When the Chinese government tells its citizens that they can worship in a certain building on a certain day, but once they leave that building they must bow to the secular orthodoxy of the state, you have a cynical lie at work. They’ve substituted a toothless ‘freedom of worship’ for ‘freedom of religion’.

Eric Metaxas

Categorized in : Lying Government Cynical

Belief in God is an act of faith. But so is believing our existence is simply the result of chance.

Eric Metaxas

faith inspirational life

Religion is the most fragile of all freedoms. And that's because it is the most threatening to those in power.

Eric Metaxas

fragile threatening

The more science learns, the clearer it is that although we are here, we shouldn't be. Once we begin considering the details of it all, the towering odds against our existence begin to become a bit unsettling. When we come to see the superlatively extreme precariousness of our existence, and begin to understand how by any accounting, we ought not to exist, what are we to think or feel? Our existence seems to be not merely a virtually impossible miracle but the most outrageous miracle conceivable, one that makes previously amazing miracles seem like almost nothing.

Eric Metaxas

miracle odds thinking

Ever heard of anyone executed for distributing copies of Grimm's fairy tales? Imagine people trying to smuggle copies of Hans Christian Andersen's works into China? The Bible, which has been called a mere collection of myths has suffered all of these fates: even today, copies of the Bible are banned and burned. There's something about this ancient book that threatens and frightens those in power.

Eric Metaxas

fate christian book

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

speaks-out eight years

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

ships limits trying

True faith is not a leap into the dark; it's a leap into the light

Eric Metaxas

leap light dark

Ideas have far-reaching consequences, and one must be ever so careful about what one allows to lodge in one's brain.

Eric Metaxas

reaching brain ideas

Bonhoeffer knew that twisting the Truth to sell it more effectively was inexcusable. For Bonhoeffer the challenge was to present the Truth as purely as possible without attempting to help it along or dress it up.

Eric Metaxas

challenges dresses helping

Jesus was and is the enemy of dead religion.

Eric Metaxas

enemy jesus

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

democracy real goal

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

motive principles easy

Christianity contains within itself a germ hostile to the Church (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

Eric Metaxas

germs church christianity

...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

christian running order

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

ties church speak

We've gone all the way from foolishly accepting authority to foolishly rejecting all authority.

Eric Metaxas

authority gone way

The family trees of Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer are everywhere so laden with figures of accomplishment that one might expect future generations to be burdened by it all. But the welter of wonderfulness that was their heritage seemed to have been a boon, one that buoyed them up so that each child seems not only to have stood on the shoulders of giants but also to have danced on them.

Eric Metaxas

accomplishment tree children

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

butterfly purpose mind

He did not hope that God heard his prayers; he knew it.

Eric Metaxas

prayer heard

They (theological liberals)seemed to know what the answer was supposed to be and weren't much concerned with how to get there. They knew only that whatever answers the Fundamentalists came up with must be wrong.

Eric Metaxas

theological concerned answers