How a tweet turned Eric Metaxas into my brother
It’s all fun and games until your political enemy calls you “dear sister in Christ.”
I have to admit that when I realized I’d learned a theological lesson from the foreword Eric Metaxas wrote to a book about the faith of Donald Trump, I was annoyed. Not by the lesson, which was spot-on, but by the identity of its messenger.
I’m a mainline Protestant pastor with progressive political views. It’s not like I spend every day thinking about Metaxas, but when I do, I feel something between lament and anger. He’s a person of faith who knows how to write compellingly for a popular audience about things that really matter. That’s why I sent his biography of Martin Luther to a Famous Luther Scholar, who agreed to review it for our magazine in time for the 2017 Fall Books issue, which would coincide with the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. But in my view, using your moral authority and media access to promulgate faith-related arguments telling Christians they should support President Trump is unconscionable, a capitulation to culture wars fabricated decades ago by people whose greed for power overwhelmed their ability to distinguish between Caesar and God.
As I awaited the review of Metaxas’s book (and heard him make repeated public statements about why Christians should support Trump), I secretly hoped that Famous Luther Scholar would write a critical review—as a scholar had done in our pages for Metaxas’s biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But the deadline passed, and the review never materialized. When I reached out to Famous Luther Scholar, I learned that the book had never arrived. It had been lost by the U.S. Postal Service. (Insert joke here about liberal being foiled by Big Government, who can’t even be trusted to ensure delivery of a small package.) I hypothesized with Famous Luther Scholar that maybe the package was locked up somewhere in a storage unit, adding that some days I wished Metaxas were locked up in a storage unit (“with food and water, of course,” I added charitably). Ha ha ha. Don’t forget to slap your knee. Famous Luther Scholar wisely ignored my wisecrack.
