A Review
By Viola Larson
Religionless Christianity: God’s
Answer to Evil
by Eric Metaxas
Many years ago,
working toward a BA in Religious Studies and one in Philosophy I took an
excellent class on the history of religion in America. The teacher a Jewish
lady would put an outline on the board with the different items we would be discussing
for the day. One class, she wrote Bonhoeffer’s name under the “God is Dead” theologians.
Having already worked on a paper that looked at Bonhoeffer’s term “Religionless
Christianity, I asked her to please not categorize Bonhoeffer that way. She
kindly erased his name.
Eric Metaxas has written a follow up book to
his Letter to the American Church. Metaxas in his new book, Religionless Christianity,
uses a term Dietrich Bonhoeffer used in letters he wrote from prison.
Bonhoeffer was attempting to write about the only way modern humanity would
embrace God. Metaxas compares the term to what he calls “Mere Christianity,” a
term C.S. Lewis used to express the Christianity that all orthodox Christians
agree to. But Metaxas redefines the meaning of both “Religionless Christianity”
and “Mere Christianity.” This review will explain the meaning of both and look
at some of the members of the Confessing Church that Metaxas uses to advise the
Church in these troubling times.
Metaxas rightly states of Bonhoeffer’s phrase,
“… So many decades, much of what he wrote—especially his use of the phrase
religionless Christianity—was utterly misunderstood. Many earnestly believed
that in the last two years of his life, Bonhoeffer had skittered away from a
genuine biblical faith into somekind of agnostic ethical humanism.”[1] But Metaxas' explanation of religionless
Christianity holds neither biblical truthfulness nor the richness of Bonhoeffer’s
meaning.
Metaxas sets
up a false effigy, a scarecrow of most of the American Church. If he were
writing about the progressive church, those who deny the deity of Christ, or
his atonement or bodily resurrection, he could then point to the skepticism
those churches are involved in, but he is looking a different direction. He is
accusing those Christians who refuse his mixture of supposed evil alongside the
real evil of being false Christians. Metaxas in explaining what “woke” culture
or cancel culture is posits the idea that not seeing the 2020 election as
stolen is the same as accepting gay marriage, and believing that the COVID
vaccine is helpful is the same as not believing the Bible is the Word of God. He
is making a political mess out of the truths of Christianity. [2]
Metaxas defines
“mere Christianity” as a cold impersonal, works oriented faith, a dead faith
and even satanic. And yet insists on works that mesh with his political views, quoting
James’s truth that faith without works is dead. [3]
But mere
Christianity simply speaks to those biblical truths that all Christians agree
to such as the deity of Jesus’ and His bodily resurrection. And truthfully, active
Christianity, loving God, loving neighbor and even loving enemies are a part of
mere Christianity. The faith that Jesus calls us to has a great deal to do with
caring for the needy, caring for the stranger, loving each other and being
faithful to our Lord. And yes, despite what Metaxas thinks, (He faults
Christians who question if we are living in the last days), looking for the
coming of Jesus, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in a thousand years, Is mere
Christianity. It might be many years but we are always looking and longing.
In his
letters Bonhoeffer enlarges and focuses on a Lutheran and biblical truth with
his reference to religionless Christianity. That is the theology of the cross
in contrast to the theology of glory. There
are several passages in his Letters that speak of his thoughts on this issue
but I believe that a poem he included is his best explanation:
Men go to
God when they are sore bestead
Pray to Him
for succour, for his peace, for bread
For mercy,
for them sick, sinning or dead;
All men do
so, Christian and unbelieving.
Men go to
God when He is sore bestead,
Find him
poor and scorned, without shelter or bread,
Whelmed
under weight of the wicked, the weak, the dead;
Christians
stand by God in his hour of grieving.
God goes to
every man when sore bestead,
Feeds body
and spirit with his bread;
For
Christians, pagans alike he hangs dead,
And both
alike forgiving.[4]
Bonhoeffer was
attempting to put Christ at the center of faith, rather than being at the edge
becoming only the answer to questions that had not yet been answered by
progressive culture. He saw Christ’s suffering on the cross as the place where
modern humanity could meet God and truly it is always so. A bruised reed he
will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not extinguish (Isaiah 42:
3a). The graciousness of Christ, his suffering mercy is religionless
Christianity rather than any political stance.
Metaxas
tends to use his subjects, characters, in a demeaning way to make his points. He
has a whole chapter on Marin Niemöller
entitled “The Cautionary Tale of Martin Niemöller.” He, although noting that Niemöller
was a good man, uses his story to warn Christians. He writes:
As tempted as we are to thank that we would have behaved like
Bonhoeffer, it is infinitely more likely that we would have behaved like Niemöller,
who was a genuinely good man and a deeply committed Christian but who nonetheless
misread the situation fatally.
But no, Niemöller, who at first did think that Hitler might be
a good leader for Germany did not read the situation fatally but was in error.
But that quickly changed and Metaxas does not tell the story with much integrity.
He insists that Niemöller was alone in a meeting with Hitler. But the meeting
began with several members of what would become the Confessing Church. Metaxas
attempts to picture Niemöller as giving in to Hitler’s rages, writing that he told
Hitler “We are all enthusiastic about the Third Reich.” But this was from a
later document signed by several Confessing pastors. Hubert G. Locke as editor
of Martin Niemöller’s letters from Moabit Prison writes in his Introduction:
On January 24, 1934, Niemöller joined a delegation of church
leaders to protest some of the degrees of the Reich bishop, a meeting
characterized by “heated” exchanges between Niemöller and Hitler; Niemöller told Hitler that church leaders had a God
given responsibility toward the German people.[5]
Karl Barth stated of Niemöller: I think of him as the embodiment of ‘Barmen … Pastor Niemöller in the Dahlem congregation was and is exemplary for the “Church Struggle.”[6]
The strange outlook of Metaxas is that he is using Bonhoeffer to warn today’s Church against what he considers evil while missing the glaring truth that Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church members were warning the Church of their time against a man and system that is not unlike the man and his cohorts he is promoting. Not only promoting but insisting that those Christians who refuse to vote for ex-president Trump are not following God.
Hitler is a ghostly shadow of what Trump is and could become. Trump despises the weak and disabled. He sees Jesus as being part of a positive Christianity rather than the suffering savior who died for his sins. He seeks no forgiveness. He maligns women in the worst kinds of ways. He calls those who disagree with him communist, fascist, and even vermin. He adores authoritarian leaders. He believes that all of those seeking safety in America will damage our blood. He calls for vengeance against his perceived enemies and is friends with those who hope to both imprison and hang enemies.
Trump’s followers including Metaxas, not unlike the German Christians he is writing about malign and exclude those who wish to honor Jesus rather than Trump.
Yes, there is a mandate for the Church to hold on to the biblical purity of marriage: intimacy after marriage and that between one woman and one man. And the Church is pro-life or it is not the Church. But the Church is also the messenger of God’s mercy because of the death and resurrection of Jesus. It is the messenger of forgiveness for sinners, not the unrepentant. The Church is called not to political activism, the promoting of presidents but lifting up Jesus as Savior and Lord.
[1] For
an excellent explanation of some of Bonhoeffer’s difficult statements see, Worldly
Preaching: Lectures on Homiletics: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, editor Clyde E Fant
(New York: Crossroad 1991).
[2] Eric
Metaxas, Religionless Christianity: God’s Answer to Evil, (New York: Regnery
Faith 2024) 85.
[3] I
have written Martin Luther’s response to the question of works in my article Eric
Metaxas' Letter to the American Church and the Rest of the Story
“Faith, however, is a divine work to us that changes
us and makes us to be born anew of God, John 1[12-13]. It kills the old Adam
and makes us altogether different men, in heart and spirit and mind and powers;
it brings with it the Holy Spirit. O, it is a living, busy active, mighty
thing, this faith. It is impossible for it not to be doing good works
incessantly. It does not ask whether good works are to be done, but before the
question is asked, it has already done them, and is constantly doing them. Whoever
does not do such works, however, is an unbeliever. He gropes and looks around
for faith and good works, but knows neither what faith is nor what good works
are. Yet he talks and talks, with many words, about faith and good works.
Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s
grace, so sure and certain that the believer would stake his life on it a
thousand times. This knowledge and confidence of God’s grace makes men glad and
bold and happy in dealing with God and all creatures. And this is the work that
the Holy Spirit performs in faith Because of it, without compulsion, a
person is ready and glad to do good to everyone, to serve everyone, to suffer
everything, out of love and praise to God, who has shown him this grace. Thus
it is impossible to separate works from faith, quite as impossible as to
separate heat and light from fire. [LW 35:370-71]”
[4] Detrich
Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison, editor, Eberhard Bethge, reprint
(New York, Collier Books 1971) 348-349.
[5] Exile
in the Fatherland: Martin Niemöller’s Letters From Moabit Prison, editor Hubert
G. Locke, (William B. Eerdman’s publishing Company: Grand Rapids 1986) 8.
[6] Barmen
is the confession that the Confessing Church drew up in their battle against
Hitler, the Nazis and the German Christians, The Church Struggle was against
all three. Arthur C. Cochrane, The Church’s Confession Under Hitler, (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press 1961) 110.
