Eric Metaxas > Quotes

“Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God's will.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic. Do not defend God's word, but testify to it. Trust to the Word. It is a ship loaded to the very limits of its capacity. -Dietrich Bonhoeffer”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“...when someone asked Bonhoeffer whether he shouldn't join the German Christians in order to work against them from within, he answered that he couldn't. 'If you board the wrong train,' he said, 'it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“Many years later, after Niemöller had been imprisoned for eight years in concentration camps as the personal prisoner of Adolf Hitler, he penned these infamous words:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out -
because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionist, and I did not speak out -
because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out -
because I was not a Jew.
And then they came for me -
and there was no one left to speak for me.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“Death is only dreadful for those who live in dread and fear of it. Death is not wild and terrible, if only we can be still and hold fast to God’s Word. Death is not bitter, if we have not become bitter ourselves. Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in him. Death is mild, death is sweet and gentle; it beckons to us with heavenly power, if only we realize that it is the gateway to our homeland, the tabernacle of joy, the everlasting kingdom of peace.

How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether, in our human fear and anguish we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly, blessed event in the world? Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made "legal." Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“He well knew his mind's natural tendency to be endlessly on a thousand subjects at once, to flit from this to that and to the next thing to no particular purpose--indeed, he called it his "butterfly mind.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“It was not apathy or passiveness. For him, prayer was a display of the strongest possible activity.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“Where a people prays, there is the church; and where the church is; there is never loneliness.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“There was only one reality, and Christ was Lord over all of it, or none.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“It's so easy to become a grumbler, someone who condemns and carps at everything on principle and sees an ulterior motive behind it.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“He did not hope that God heard his prayers; he knew it.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“Just ten years ago, probably the most prominent atheist of the twentieth century, Antony Flew, concluded that a God must have designed the universe. It was shocking news and made international headlines. Flew came to believe that the extraordinarily complex genetic code in DNA simply could not be accounted for naturalistically. It didn’t make logical sense to him that it had happened merely by chance, via random mutations. It is a remarkable thing that Flew had the humility and intellectual honesty to do a public about-face on all he had stood for and taught for five decades.”
― Eric Metaxas, Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life

“Bonhoeffer examined and dismissed a number of approaches to dealing with evil. "Reasonable people," he said, think that "with a little reason, they can pull back together a structure that has come apart at the joints." Then there are the ethical "fanatics" who "believe that they can face the power of evil with the purity of their will and their principles." Men of"conscience" become overwhelmed because the "countless respectable and seductive disguises and masks in which evil approaches them make their conscience anxious and unsure until they finally content themselves with an assuaged conscience instead of a good conscience." They must "deceive their own conscience in order not to despair." Finally there are some who retreat to a "private virtuousness. Such people neither steal, nor murder,nor commit adultery, but do good according to their abilities. but... they must close their eyes and ears to the injustice around them. Only at the cost of self-deception can they keep their private blamelessness clean from the stains of responsible action in the world. In all that they do, what they fail to do will not let them rest.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“He had theologically redefined the Christian life as something active, not reactive. It had nothing to do with avoiding sin or with merely talking or teaching or believing theological notions or principles or rules or tenets. It had everything to do with living one’s whole life in obedience to God’s call through action. It did not merely require a mind, but a body too. It was God’s call to be fully human, to live as human beings obedient to the one who had made us, which was the fulfillment of our destiny. It was not a cramped, compromised, circumspect life, but a life lived in a kind of wild, joyful, full-throated freedom—that was what it was to obey God.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“the only fight which is lost is that which we give up.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“Bonhoeffer thought of death as the last station on the road to freedom.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“Future generations would be convinced that nothing good could ever have existed in a country that produced such evil. They would think only of these evils. It would be as if these unleashed dark forces had grotesquely marched like devils on dead horses, backward through the gash in the present, and had destroyed the German past too.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“This was one of the casualties of war, that trust itself seemed to die a thousand deaths.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things, as is Christ himself.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic. . . . Do not defend God’s Word, but testify to it. . . . Trust to the Word. It is a ship loaded to the very limits of its capacity!”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“Where God tears great gaps we should not try to fill them with human words. They should remain open. Our only comfort is the God of the resurrection, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who also was and is his God.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“Bonhoeffer's experiences with African American community underscored an idea that was developing in his mind: the only real piety and power that he had seen in the American church seemed to be in the churches where there were a present reality and a past history of suffering.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“The Americans speak so much about freedom in their sermons. Freedom as a possession is a doubtful thing for a church; freedom must be won under the compulsion of a necessity. Freedom for the church comes from the necessity of the Word of God. Otherwise it becomes arbitrariness and ends in a great many new ties.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“Atheism tells him what he isn’t, and like all of us he yearns to know what he is.”
― Eric Metaxas

“Taken all together, it’s difficult to escape the verdict that William Wilberforce was simply the greatest social reformer in the history of the world.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“It is a question of the freedom of God, which finds its strongest evidence precisely in that God freely chose to be bound to historical human beings and to be placed at the disposal of human beings. God is free not from human beings but for them. Christ is the word of God’s freedom.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“Describing Bonhoeffer's demeanor on returning to danger in Germany rather than safety in America, with "with a strong and joyful firmness such as only arises out of realized freedom. ”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“...we've gone all the way from foolishly accepting authority to foolishly rejecting all authority.”
― Eric Metaxas, 7 Men: And the Secret of Their Greatness

“A major theme for Bonhoeffer was that every Christian must be "fully human" by bringing God into his whole life, not merely into some "spiritual" realm. To be an ethereal figure who merely talked about God, but somehow refused to get his hands dirty in the real world in which God had placed him, was bad theology. Through Christ, God had shown that he meant us to be in this world and to obey him with our actions in his word. So Bonhoeffer would get his hands dirty, not because he had grown impatient, but because God was speaking to him about further steps of obedience.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy