Eric Church Quotes

Funny how a melody sounds like a memory.

Where a people prays, there is the church; and where the church is; there is never loneliness.

Deana Carter sings about it. Lady Antebellum sings about it. Eric Church. Gosh, not just country artists. Katy Perry. Everybody has a song about it because everybody's been through it. You find that person at eighteen and you lose yourself. And the tragedy is, it's the person who's completely opposed to everything you've ever wanted. You bond with that person, and that person breaks your heart. I'm that tragedy for you, and you're mine.

A state which which includes within itself a terrorized Church has lost its most faithful servant.

The loyalty of the true believer is to the whole -- the church, party, nation -- and not to his fellow true believer.

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.

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.

Jesus didn't just give hugs; He also gave a hammer. Paul didn't just pass on holy kisses; he also tirelessly dealt out swift and holy kicks to the rear end of the ancient church. The Bible has the manly stuff intact, and that is why it is such a great mystery how it got lost in the modern church.

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

Speak out for those who cannot speak”—who in the church today realizes that this is the very least that the Bible requires of us?

The thing is, the promise of church is community, salvation, and a relationship with God. If the gay music minister and the person with AIDS cannot be part of the church, where do they find God?

Not many would fault the modern church for being unloving these days, but unloving is exactly what we are. For if we truly loved God, we would obey Him (John 14:21). If we truly loved the church, we would labor to keep it unstained and unmolested by this world (James 1:27). And if we truly loved the lost, we would introduce them to the God of the Bible who is able to save their souls, and not the pitiful god of our own making who is having a hard time saving anything at all (Psalm 50:21).

It rains on everyone. It may be storming but there is a covering. Life may be challenging, but there is a covering. It may seem impossible, hopeless, doubtful, fear-ridden, and pain-laden, but there is a covering. There are other umbrellas, but only one is red with the blood of Jesus. We need to love Jesus more than the noise.

Faith is either something that informs one at all times or it isn’t anything at all, really. 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”.

If Christ is the head of the church and we are the body, lets be disciples who master the noise.

The church is not a brick-and-mortar structure. The church is made of flesh & blood. Followers of #Christ are the church.

We need to get to the heart of each heart issue—and we can’t do it. Only the Maker can. The world needs #Jesus.

Battling the noise is creating a space for God and acknowledging the space He occupies, which is all of it. Invite God into all twenty-four hours of your day. This is the path of a #StaticJedi.

Black troops helped construct schools, churches, and orphanages, organized debating societies, and held political gatherings where “freedom songs” were sung and soldiers delivered “speeches of the most inflammatory kind.

The more we have of Jesus, the greater the love we have; the greater the love, the greater the sacrifice; the greater the sacrifice, the more we become like Jesus; the more we become like Jesus, the more successful our local churches become.

When others sit, a #StaticJedi is found standing—even standing along, with a message not in hand but secure in heart!

Cornel West says: “If your success is defined as being well adjusted to injustice and well adapted to indifference, then we don’t want successful leaders.

The bourgeoisie of the third quarter of the nineteenth century was overwhelmingly ‘liberal’, not necessarily in a party sense (though as we have seen Liberal parties were prevalent), as in an ideological sense. They believed in capitalism, in competitive private enterprise, technology, science and reason. They believed in progress, in a certain amount of representative government, a certain amount of civil rights and liberties, so long as these were compatible with the rule of law and with the kind of order which kept the poor in their place. They believed in culture rather than religion, in extreme cases substituting the ritual attendance at opera, theatre or concert for that at church. They believed in the career open to enterprise and talent, and that their own lives proved its merits.

What counts as social infrastructure? I define it capaciously. Public institutions such as libraries, schools, playgrounds, parks, athletic fields, and swimming pools are vital parts of the social infrastructure. So too are sidewalks, courtyards, community gardens, and other green spaces that invite people into the public realm. Community organizations, including churches and civic associations, act as social infrastructures when they have an established physical space where people can assemble, as do regularly scheduled markets for food, furniture, clothing, art, and other consumer goods. Commercial establishments can also be important parts of the social infrastructure, particularly when they operate as what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg called "third spaces," places (like cafes, diners, barbershops, and bookstores) where people are welcome to congregate and linger regardless of what they've purchased.

So what stands in place of the Christian message? An ethical and social idealism borne by a faith in progress that - who knows how - claims the right to call itself "Christian." And in the place of the church as the congregation of believers in Christ there stands the church as a social corporation." ~Bonhoeffer

But in the gospel, man is not just reconciled to God by faith. Man is also reconciled to man by faith. (See 2 Cor. 5:18). God has given to us the ministry of reconciliation. He doesn’t give us the luxury of refusing to be reconciled.

Most church systems in America today are an environment where men can satisfy a religious itch, get an ounce of God, and hide from any real dealing with their personal issues. Not only will this never manifest the oneness that Jesus wanted amongst His own (John 17:22), but it will also cause an inoculation toward the real desire of God for His people.

Colorblind theology denies Christ’s power to heal racial divisions, disparities, and injustices by ignoring their ongoing impact. Colorblind theology undermines unity in the church by refusing to acknowledge significant ethnic differences or address significant problems.

The black church is quite literally a sounding board for vetting ideas and voicing frustrations so black folk can stay sane in the midst of America’s denial of black humanity.

Whether the church in America is really “free,” I doubt.

A church that does not keep step with modern scientific knowledge is doomed.

[F]or sometime [the church struggle] hasn’t even been about what it appears to be about; the lines have been drawn somewhere else entirely.

If the 8th Pennsylvania had not made its costly charge, the pickets might not have fired on Jackson.

A Federal officer called Wyndham “a big bag of wind.

The gospel is supposed to bring people together who wouldn’t naturally be together.

We are called to follow His example of caring for the physical needs of others in order that the gospel witness of the kingdom might saturate the earth.

The Woke Church is one that is aware of the urgent needs in its community and does more than just talk about those needs

separation of church and state does not result in the church continuing to apply itself to its own task; it is no guarantee against secularization. Nowhere is the church more secularized than where it is separated in principle as it is here. This very separation can create an opposition, so that the church engages much more strongly in political and secular things.

But rarely do you hear a church described, first and foremost, by the character, power, and content of its preaching. This is because few preachers today are true servants of the Word.

There is a growing body of evidence that “race affects how teachers see and treat their students. Black students taught by white teachers are less likely to be identified for gifted programs than black students taught by black teachers, for example. Other research has shown biases in teachers’ grading of work by students of different genders, races and ethnicities.”5

So if someone attacks us for being political, we must cheerfully ignore their criticism. To allow the voices of this world to silence us in this way is precisely how the German Church was silenced.

It is now July 2015, the midpoint of a summer that feels like no other in Supreme’s memory. Two weeks earlier, a white supremacist had gunned down nine Black worshippers at a historic church in Charleston. The country seems ripe for another civil war, with a cohort of white Americans defending their Confederate flags while Black activists mount a movement that has enshrined Eric Garner’s name. In Texas public schools, new social studies textbooks have minimized the role of slavery in the Civil War, while a geography book depicts slaves as “workers” who came by way of “immigration” from Africa.

hard for me to hear the constant refrain of “just preach the gospel.” When the topic is abortion, nobody says, “just preach the gospel.” We preach against abortion as if it’s a gospel issue. When the topic is sex trafficking, no one says “just preach the gospel.” We develop a battalion to go and get people out of sex trafficking. And we should because these are crucial issues. But so is racial justice!

A basic tension existed. The Church (or mosque or synagogue) was the keeper of tradition; creativity, at least in the Western formulation, represents a break with tradition. It’s a recipe for conflict. Sometimes,

But in a few years, as part of their effort to push Jews out of German public life, the Nazis would attempt to puah them out of the German church too. That these "non-Aryans" had publicly converted to the Christian faith meant nothing, since the lens through which the Nazis saw the world was purely racial. One's genetic makeup and ancestral bloodline were all that mattered; one's most deeply held beliefs counted for nothing.

It is incumbent on leadership to reevaluate areas where women have been relegated to serve that are not based on biblical prohibitions but rather on cultural practices that may be extensions of sexism and misogyny.

There’s a tendency to want to gloss over injustices for the sake of unity. However, any authentic attempt to pursue unity and reconciliation must start with truth. The journey toward healing begins with an awakening.

One of the most difficult things for me to deal with is the refusal for many evangelicals to acknowledge the truths about what has happened in our country. Our history has been hard for people of color, and the church must be willing to acknowledge those hard truths if we are to move toward healing. Much of our history is shrouded in darkness because it is hard to talk about and even harder to understand from our vantage point today.

We are called to advocate for the poor as an outworking of being a wise covenant community. This is the legacy of the church. Defending the cause of the needy and oppressed is a huge role that we are to be known for as the people of God.

Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.

The entire education of the younger generation of theologians belongs today in church cloister-like schools, in which pure doctrine, the Sermon on the Mount and worship are taken seriously—as they never are (and in present circumstances couldn’t be) at the university. It

Lasserre got Bonhoeffer thinking along lines that would lead him to become involved in the ecumenical movement: “Do we believe in the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, or do we believe in the eternal mission of France? One can’t be a Christian and a nationalist at the same time.

Mrs. Amstutz asked Eric three times how much he thought the cross weighed. He thinks of the question every time he goes to church and sees the cross hanging over the altar, and every time, he remembers his answer: the ten-year old Eric squeaked out that he couldn't imagine anything being that heavy.

I felt I’d disappointed my parents. And my church. And my whole race, actually. Isn’t that the prevailing narrative for people in oppressed groups of all kinds: your ancestors suffered so you could achieve, so you better achieve. Rosa Parks didn’t sit on that bus for me to go to New York and turn gay.

Paganism, it turns out, was the original Icelandic religion before a mass conversion in the year 1000. That was largely seen as a business decision, and Icelanders have never been particularly good Christians. They attend church if someone is born or wed or dies, but otherwise they are, as one Icelander put it, “atheists with good intentions.

Unfortunately, much damage has been brought to the reputation of the church by Christians who say one thing and do another. This is not to say we can ever be perfect, but it is of utmost importance that we live lives of consistency and integrity in order to safeguard the name of Christ, whom we represent, as well as the reputation of his church. The truth of the matter is we should all be grieved about sin in our lives. And when we see it, we should address it, confessing it and forsaking it out of reverence for God. It is only when we are consistently doing this ourselves that we are qualified and able to address the sins in the lives of our brothers and sisters in the church, which we must do as well.

Couch later wrote, “The retrograde movement had prepared me for something of the kind, but to hear from his own lips that the advantages gained by the successful marches of his lieutenants were to culminate in fighting a defensive battle in that nest of thickets was too much, and I retired from his presence with the belief that my commanding general was a whipped man.

Simply suffering—that is what will be needed then—not parries, blows or thrusts such as may still be possible or admissible in the preliminary fight; the real struggle that perhaps lies ahead must simply be to suffer faithfully. . . . [F]or sometime [the church struggle] hasn’t even been about what it appears to be about; the lines have been drawn somewhere else entirely.

This regiment included some of the most famous army officers of the era, including Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, then–Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, Major George H. Thomas, Captains Edmund Kirby Smith and Earl Van Dorn, then-Lieutenant Fitzhugh Lee, and Lieutenant John Bell Hood—all of whom became general officers during the Civil War and five of whom commanded armies.

The church has only one altar, the altar of the Almighty . . . before which all creatures must kneel. . . . Whoever seeks something other than this must keep away; he cannot join us in the house of God. . . . The church has only one pulpit, and from that pulpit, faith in God will be preached, and no other faith, and no other will than the will of God, however well-intentioned.

During my first few years as a believer I not only couldn’t shut up about my faith, I was sometimes judgmental toward some of those who didn’t share it. But on the other side of that equation, I remember having powerful feelings of love and empathy toward total strangers, a sense of God’s love for them, and a desire to do anything I could to show them his love, to bless them, to help them. It was all somewhat overwhelming, but I’m happy to say that most of it was on the positive side of this equation. I was often hardest on those who were already in the Christian world but whom I felt were not as zealous as they could be in reaching those who didn’t know God. As is typical, I was hardest on my own—my family and my childhood church, the Greek Orthodox Church.

Protesting often times takes a stance of offense; a form of violence that may not always be physical but is a form of violence all the same. Everyone has the right to be heard, but only if they are willing to really listen to others in an attempt to understand. As an atheist, I have never stood outside a church and disrupted their gathering, although I am willing to have a conversation about how my journey brought me here and how you have come to this point. For me to enter a gathering and protest is an offensive move that would cause the people involved to put up walls. It would not be welcomed and I would not do it. It would be a hindrance to us actually knowing and understanding each other. The only way to truly know someone is by being with them, by conversation.

What Paul is saying is that the gospel strengthens us through the Spirit to see things in our society that others do not. We are called, as the people of God, to wake up. To see what others don’t and call it out. The church in America is not awake to the reality of what is happening in communities across this nation, and we are missing out on our calling to shine the light into these places of darkness for Christ’s glory.

You have to be intrinsically changed by God in order for justice to be done. In other words, justice doesn’t come by legislation, because you can legislate things and nothing changes. We can go to the executive branch. We can go to the legislative branch. We can go to the judicial branch. We can put whatever kind of Supreme Court justices we want to put in place. But at the end of the day legislation doesn’t change hearts … only the gospel does.

We desperately need the gospel. I need the gospel. Every day I need Jesus’ gospel to shepherd my heart and mind. When I see all the bad news on my newsfeed on Facebook, if I’m not in my Bible, preaching the gospel to myself, looking at the eschatological hope, I will lose my mind. And so I’m glad that when we see the injustices and the brokenness of our society we have the tool of God’s Word to help us become change agents—to make a difference in our spheres of influence. The gospel is the truth that unites us. It is the common ground that knits our souls together as one.

At every turn, while he was investigating the background for his study of Thomas Nashe, he would encounter the Church — what Chesterton called (another book title) The Thing. It was everywhere. At one point, he later told me (and he was never very specific just when that point occurred), he decided that the thing had to be sorted out or he couldn't rest. Either it ws true, or it wasn't. Either the entire matter was true, all of it, exactly as the Church claimed, or it was the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on a gullible mankind. With that choice clearly delineated, he set out to find which was the case. What came next was not more study, but testing. The matter had to be tested — on its own terms: that is, by prayer. He told me that the principal prayer that he used was not some long or complex formula, but simply, "Lord, please, send me a sign." He reported that, almost immediately, not one but a deluge of signs arrived. And they continued to arrive unabated for a long time. As to just what the signs consisted in and what happened next, well, some things must remain private. The reader may deduce the rest from the fact of his conversion. ... -- Eric McLuhan, introduction

partial exception to this pattern was the Catholic Church, which generally did not require black worshippers to sit in separate pews (although its parochial schools were segregated). Some freedmen abandoned Catholicism for black-controlled Protestant denominations, but others were attracted to it precisely because, a Northern teacher reported from Natchez, “they are treated on terms of equality, at least while they are in church.” And Catholicism retained its hold on large numbers of New Orleans free blacks who, at least on Sunday, coexisted harmoniously with the city’s French and Irish white Catholic population.

8.22-5. “Fear God. Honor the emperor.” (1 Peter 2:17.) Scripture tells us that, in the as yet unredeemed world in which the Church also exists, the State has by divine appointment the task of providing for justice and peace. [It fulfills this task] by means of the threat and exercise of force, according to the measure of human judgment and human ability. The Church acknowledges the benefit of this divine appointment in gratitude and reverence before him. It calls to mind the Kingdom of God, God’s commandment and righteousness, and thereby the responsibility both of rulers and of the ruled. It trusts and obeys the power of the Word by which God upholds all things.

GENERAL BOOKS ABOUT LANGUAGE Highly readable, witty, and provocative is Roger Brown’s Words and Things. Also readable, magnificent, though sometimes too dogmatic, is Eric H. Lenneberg’s Biological Foundations of Language. The deepest and most beautiful explorations of all are to be found in L. S. Vygotsky’s Thought and Language, originally published in Russian, posthumously, in 1934, and later translated by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vahar. Vygotsky has been described—not unjustly—as “the Mozart of psychology.” A personal favorite of mine is Joseph Church’s Language and the Discovery of Reality: A Developmental Psychology of Cognition, a book one goes back to again and again.

The church would have no choice but to formally remove them from the fellowship. This doesn’t mean that everyone who remains in the church is perfect. We’re all sinners. But that’s not the issue. The issue is about the one who hardens his or her heart toward their sin and refuses to acknowledge and turn from it. When that happens, the church is obligated by none other than Christ himself to dismiss them from the recognized community of faith. This is a somber and humble but necessary step. As Christians, our goal should be never to give up on someone. So even if the church has to move to exclude someone from the fellowship, they should still be attempting to reach out to that person and win them to the Lord.

But this doesn’t mean that everything about it is reserved for our future in heaven. I would also argue that a whole host of blessing and prosperity can come to us in the here and now. But these are primarily spiritual blessings—blessings like reconciliation, forgiveness, peace with God, fellowship in the church, and love. Blessings like the fruit of the Spirit, answers to prayer, and joy in worship. But if we make the mistake of redefining the phrase “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” with our own preconceived notion of what that ought to look like for our lives today in the material sense, then we’ve overlooked and hijacked the context to suit our own human needs and desires.

wire artist singles out a man in the front of the crowd, who seemed most confident in answering affirmatively. “You, sir!” the high-wire artist says to the man. “You say you believe that I can wheel the barrow across the cataract. Is that true? Do you really believe it?” “I do!” the man says. “Even with a heavy load inside the barrow?” “Why not? Certainly!” “Very well,” the high-wire artist says, “I’m glad to hear it. So please help me to show everyone else that I can do it by getting into the barrow!” Suddenly whether the man really and truly believes this can be done has become terribly personal. If he does, he should have no difficulty getting into the barrow. But if he doesn’t really and truly believe, he will never get into it.

Now, this does not negate the fact that God might choose to bless us with a great paying job, a beautiful family, and a healthy life on account of his grace. But the bottom line is we should never expect those things to happen or seek to appeal to the promise of Jeremiah 29:11–13 in order to substantiate our expectations. We have no right to hold God hostage to a promise that we have misunderstood. Friends, in the end, we should never be looking and living for our own glory in this life. Instead, we should be living for God’s glory now and waiting for the glory that we will receive from him in the life to come. The Bible says we should consider ourselves as aliens and strangers in this world. God will fulfill his promises, yes, but not all of his promises were meant to be fulfilled the way we want them to be fulfilled in this life, and we cannot twist Scripture around in order to make that happen, or to make Scripture work for us the way we want it to. We have to live by faith. And those who do will receive what he promised. And when we seek him with all of our heart, we will certainly find him. I’ve grown up a lot since church camp, and I still believe that it’s permissible for someone to choose for themselves a life verse. But let’s agree to study it in context first, lest we make the catastrophic mistake of misusing and misapplying it. Jeremiah 29:11–13 contains some great promises, but if I use it to demand the American Dream from God, then perhaps I should also be willing to literally endure seventy years of captivity first (if that’s what God should choose). I think it’s better to use it to inspire us to look for the spiritual life that is truly life now, while trusting in the future hope of the life that is yet to come.

LaVey’s bible (1969), members worship the trinity of the devil—Lucifer, Satan, and the Devil—including nine pronouncements of the devil that Satan represents: 1. indulgence, instead of abstinence, 2. vital existence, instead of spiritual pipe dreams, 3. undefiled wisdom instead of hypocritical self-deceit, 4. kindness to those who deserve it, instead of love wasted on ingrates, 5. vengeance, instead of turning the other cheek, 6. responsibility, instead of concern for the psychic vampires, 7. man as just another animal, sometimes better, more often worse, than those who walk on all fours, who because of his divine and intellectual development has become the most vicious of all, 8. all of the so-called sins, as they lead to physical, mental, or emotional gratification, 9. the best friend the church has ever had, as he has kept it in business all these years (LaVey, 1969, p. 25). Holmes (1990), who interviewed two

You’ll see the day, ten years from now, when Adolf Hitler will occupy precisely the same position in Germany that Jesus Christ has now. —REINHARD HEYDRICH One sometimes hears that Hitler was a Christian. He was certainly not, but neither was he openly anti-Christian, as most of his top lieutenants were. What helped him aggrandize power, he approved of, and what prevented it, he did not. He was utterly pragmatic. In public he often made comments that made him sound pro-church or pro-Christian, but there can be no question that he said these things cynically, for political gain. In private, he possessed an unblemished record of statements against Christianity and Christians. Especially early in his career, Hitler wished to appear as a typical German, so he praised the churches as bastions of morality and traditional values. But he also felt that, in time, the churches would adapt to the National Socialist way of thinking. They would eventually be made into vessels for Nazi ideology, so it little served his purposes to destroy them. It would be easier to change what already existed and benefit from whatever cultural cachet they possessed. 166

It is hard to overestimate the importance of the Catholic church’s value for European culture and for the whole world. It Christianized and civilized barbaric peoples and for a long time was the only guardian of science and art. Here the church’s cloisters were preeminent. The Catholic church developed a spiritual power unequaled anywhere, and today we still admire the way it combined the principle of catholicism with the principle of one sanctifying church, as well as tolerance with intolerance. It is a world in itself. Infinite diversity flows together, and this colorful picture gives it its irresistible charm (Complexio oppositorum). A country has seldom produced so many different kinds of people as has the Catholic church. With admirable power, it has understood how to maintain unity in diversity, to gain the love and respect of the masses, and to foster a strong sense of community. . . . But it is exactly because of this greatness that we have serious reservations. Has this world [of the Catholic church] really remained the church of Christ? Has it not perhaps become an obstruction blocking the path to God instead of a road sign on the path to God? Has it not blocked the only path to salvation? Yet no one can ever obstruct the way to God. The church still has the Bible, and as long as she has it we can still believe in the holy Christian church. God’s word will never be denied (Isa. 55:11), whether it be preached by us or by our sister church. We adhere to the same confession of faith, we pray the same Lord’s Prayer, and we share some of the same ancient rites. This binds us together, and as far as we are concerned we would like to live in peace with our disparate sister. We do not, however, want to deny anything that we have recognized as God’s word. The designation Catholic or Protestant is unimportant. The important thing is God’s word. Conversely, we will never violate anyone else’s faith. God does not desire reluctant service, and God has given everyone a conscience. We can and should desire that our sister church search its soul and concentrate on nothing but the word [1 Cor. 2:12– 13]. Until that time, we must have patience. We will have to endure it when, in false darkness, the “only holy church” pronounces upon our church the “anathema” (condemnation). She doesn’t know any better, and she doesn’t hate the heretic, only the heresy. As long as we let the word be our only armor we can look confidently into the future.

He said that the church “has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society.” And before that sentence was over, he took another leap, far bolder than the first—in fact, some ministers walked out—by declaring that the church “has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.” Everyone knew that Bonhoeffer was talking about the Jews, including Jews who were not baptized Christians. Bonhoeffer then quoted Galatians: “Do good to all men.” To say that it is unequivocally the responsibility of the Christian church to help all Jews was dramatic, even revolutionary. But Bonhoeffer wasn’t through yet. 154 The third way the church can act toward the state, he said, “is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.” The translation is awkward, but he meant that a stick must be jammed into the spokes of the wheel to stop the vehicle. It is sometimes not enough to help those crushed by the evil actions of a state; at some point the church must directly take action against the state to stop it from perpetrating evil. This, he said, is permitted only when the church sees its very existence threatened by the state, and when the state ceases to be the state as defined by God. Bonhoeffer added that this condition exists if the state forces the “exclusion of baptized Jews from our Christian congregations or in the prohibition of our mission to the Jews.

No one has better attempted to explain the seeming paradox of a Christian involved in a plot to assassinate a head of state than Eberhard Bethge. He helps show that Bonhoeffer’s steps toward political resistance were not some unwarranted detour from his previous thinking, but were a natural and inevitable outworking of that thinking. Bonhoeffer always sought to be brave and to speak the truth—to “confess”—come what may; but at some point merely speaking the truth smacked of cheap grace. Bethge explained: Bonhoeffer introduced us in 1935 to the problem of what we today call political resistance. The levels of confession and of resistance could no longer be kept neatly apart. The escalating persecution of the Jews generated an increasingly intolerable situation, especially for Bonhoeffer himself. We now realized that mere confession, no matter how courageous, inescapably meant complicity with the murderers, even though there would always be new acts of refusing to be co-opted and even though we would preach “Christ alone” Sunday after Sunday. During the whole time the Nazi state never considered it necessary to prohibit such preaching. Why should it? 361 Thus we were approaching the borderline between confession and resistance; and if we did not cross this border, our confession was going to be no better than cooperation with the criminals. And so it became clear where the problem lay for the Confessing Church: we were resisting by way of confession, but we were not confessing by way of resistance.

Eric Metaxas emerged as a leading voice on Christian masculinity in the Obama era. Metaxas wasn’t new to the world of evangelical publishing, or to evangelical culture more generally. Raised in the Greek Orthodox Church, Metaxas got his start writing children’s books. In 1997 he began working as a writer and editor for Charles Colson’s BreakPoint radio show, and he then worked as a writer for VeggieTales, a children’s video series where anthropomorphic vegetables taught lessons in biblical values and Christian morality. (Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber became household names in 1990s evangelicalism.) Belying his VeggieTales pedigree, Metaxas brought a new sophistication to the literature on evangelical masculinity. As a witty, Yale-educated Manhattanite, Metaxas cut a different profile than many spokesmen of the Christian Right. If Metaxas’s writing wasn’t exactly highbrow, his was higher-brow than most books churned out by Christian presses. More suave in his presentation than the average evangelical firebrand, Metaxas was a rising star in the conservative Christian world of the 2000s. After Colson’s death in 2012 he took over BreakPoint, a program broadcast on 1400 outlets to an audience of eight million. That year he also gave the keynote address at the National Prayer Breakfast, where he relished the opportunity to scold President Obama to his face, castigating those who displayed “phony religiosity” by throwing Bible verses around and claiming to be Christian while denying the exclusivity of the faith and the humanity of the unborn. In 2015 he launched his own nationally syndicated daily radio program, The Eric Metaxas Show.

That, for a while, seemed like life. And if I was really being honest with myself, I wasn’t into it. The only option was to sit in the pews every Sunday at church and casually wonder if I was going to go to hell because of who I was? No, thank you. Or to understand that the structures on which the country was built were engineered against me? Hard pass. What choice did I have besides constantly code-switching between identities as a means of hiding in plain sight? And wasn’t it just normal to feel like such a mistake as an adult that every time I walked over a bridge or stood on a subway platform, I had to talk myself out of stepping over the edge? I came to believe I was a monster and that I deserved to feel the way I felt. And I didn’t want to turn the page. But through it all there was a constant tethering me to the idea of a future: the library. The library is the place where I could borrow first Grover’s philosophical tome, then a couple of Choose Your Own Adventures I could cheat at, and later a stack of mysteries I could spoil for myself, all attempts to look for some other way of understanding who I was. In the book stacks, I found The Bluest Eye and The Color Purple and Giovanni’s Room and David Rakoff’s Fraud and more. I saw a new vision of Otherness in those books, and the pages kept turning. At the end of every one was a wall waiting to be broken down—a lurch toward becoming—a new paragraph in a story with an ending far different from what I’d ever dared imagine. Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy. The storyteller says, “I am here. Does it matter?” The words that I found in these books were a person calling out from a page, “I am worthy of being heard and you are worthy of hearing my story.” It seems simple but it’s a bold declaration. How many times in life do we receive the message, implicit or explicit, that what we’ve experienced or what we feel isn’t noteworthy or remarkable? The books that I found in the library, ones that I deeply understood and ones that seemed so outside of my experience they might as well have been written in Klingon, all carried the same hopes: to be seen, to be heard, to exist.

…After seventeen minutes of panicky crowds destroying everything in their path, Eric could distinguish, despite all the chaos and hellish noise, the slight buzz of a second plane. He started counting to himself, watching the blazing inferno at the North Tower: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven… The second Boeing glided into the South Tower, WTC-2, and it seemed to Eric that this plane was flying slowly, that its impact was a soft one… Due to the pandemonium all around, the impact itself seemed not to be as loud as the first hit. Still, in a moment the second twin was also blazing. Both skyscrapers were on fire now. Novack looked up again at what had happened a minute before: the terror attack of the century. Then he started walking fast down Church Street, away from the huge buildings that were now on fire. He knew that in about an hour, the South Tower was to collapse completely, and half an hour after that, the same was to happen to the North Tower, which was also weakened by the impact. He knew there were tons of powerful Thermate in both buildings. Over the course of the previous two months, some fake repairmen had brought loads of it into the towers and put them in designated places around the trusswork. It was meant to make buildings collapse like card towers, which would only happen when the flames reached a certain point. The planes had started an unstoppable countdown as soon as they hit the buildings: these were the last minutes of their existence. Next in line was the third building: 7 WTC, which stood north of the Twin Towers. It counted forty-seven floors, and it too was stuffed with Thermate. Novack started getting concerned, however, that the third plane seemed to be late. Where’s the third plane? Why is it late? It’s already fifty minutes after the first impact, and they were supposed to hit the three targets with a time lag of about twenty minutes. Where are you, birdie number three? You are no less important than the first two, and you were also promised to my clients… People were still running in all directions, shouting and bumping into each other. Sirens wailed loudly, heartrendingly; ambulances were rushing around, giving way only to firefighters and emergency rescue teams. Suddenly hundreds of policemen appeared on the streets, but it seemed that they didn’t really know what they were supposed to do. They mostly ran around, yelling into their walkie-talkies. At Thomas Street, Eric walked into a parking lot: the gate arm was up and the security guy must have left, for the door of his booth stood wide open… …Two shots rang out simultaneously during the fifth and the longest second. They were executed synchronously, creating a single, stinging, deadly sound. The bullet from the sixth floor of the book depository went straight up into the sky, as planned. The second bullet shot out of a sniper rifle, held confidently in the arms of a woman behind the hedge, on the grassy knoll. It was her bullet that struck the head of the 35th US president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The woman walked quickly down the grassy knoll. Stepping only about five meters away, she put her rifle into a baby pram waiting there, with a real six-month-old baby boy whimpering inside it. She put on thick glasses and started walking away, exhibiting no haste. Only thirty seconds after the second shot, the woman was gone, nowhere to be seen… After the second or, rather, the third shot, the one from the knoll, President Kennedy’s head was tossed back. Jackie somehow managed to crawl onto the back hood of the car. A security agent from the escort car had already reached them. The motorcade picked up speed and disappeared under the overpass. Zapruder’s camera kept whirring for some seconds. He must have filmed the whole operation – that is, the assassination of an acting US president. But now he simply stood there without saying a word, completely dumbfounded...

As hip hop has made clear—and black religion, too, for that matterwhen we conceive of the horrors we confront, they have a masculine tint; we measure the terrors we face by calculating their harm to our men and boys. Thus the role of our artists has often been limited to validating the experiences, expressions, and desires of boys and men. When we name those plagued by police violence, we cite the names of the boys and men but not the names of the girls and women. We take special note of how black boys are unfairly kicked out of school while ignoring that our girls are right next to them in the line of expulsion. We empathize with black men who end up in jail because of a joint they smoked while overlooking the defense against domestic abuse that lands just as many women in jail. We offer authority and celebration to men at church to compensate for how the white world overlooks their talents unless they carry a ball or a tune. We thank black fathers for lovingly parenting their children, and many more of them do so than is recognized in the broader world, which is one reason for our gratitude. But we are relatively thankless for the near superhuman efforts of our mothers to nurture and protect us.

Is there still time for us to repent, or is it already too late? Before we continue, a word to those who do not believe we have time to repent, who believe that God must judge us because of what we already have done—and not done. Such beliefs are not biblical, and those who hold them are themselves enjoined to repent. To sulk like Jonah at what seems to be God’s forbearance with those we deem irredeemably wicked is only to become the enemies of God ourselves. Those who petulantly have decided that nothing we do now can avert judgment are themselves participating in bringing about that judgment by doing nothing. Their unwillingness to fight now will likely be the very thing that makes the crucial difference. It is ironic and tragic that they sit on the sidelines alongside those they blame for the situation.

Bonhoeffer contended in his address that if a leader’s main objective was to idolize himself, that leader was not exhibiting true, godly leadership, but was in fact a “mis-leader” of the people he pretended to lead.

…After seventeen minutes of panicky crowds destroying everything in their path, Eric could distinguish, despite all the chaos and hellish noise, the slight buzz of a second plane. He started counting to himself, watching the blazing inferno at the North Tower: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven… The second Boeing glided into the South Tower, WTC-2, and it seemed to Eric that this plane was flying slowly, that its impact was a soft one… Due to the pandemonium all around, the impact itself seemed not to be as loud as the first hit. Still, in a moment the second twin was also blazing. Both skyscrapers were on fire now. Novack looked up again at what had happened a minute before: the terror attack of the century. Then he started walking fast down Church Street, away from the huge buildings that were now on fire. He knew that in about an hour, the South Tower was to collapse completely, and half an hour after that, the same was to happen to the North Tower, which was also weakened by the impact. He knew there were tons of powerful Thermate in both buildings. Over the course of the previous two months, some fake repairmen had brought loads of it into the towers and put them in designated places around the trusswork. It was meant to make buildings collapse like card towers, which would only happen when the flames reached a certain point. The planes had started an unstoppable countdown as soon as they hit the buildings: these were the last minutes of their existence. Next in line was the third building: 7 WTC, which stood north of the Twin Towers. It counted forty-seven floors, and it too was stuffed with Thermate. Novack started getting concerned, however, that the third plane seemed to be late. Where’s the third plane? Why is it late? It’s already fifty minutes after the first impact, and they were supposed to hit the three targets with a time lag of about twenty minutes. Where are you, birdie number three? You are no less important than the first two, and you were also promised to my clients… People were still running in all directions, shouting and bumping into each other. Sirens wailed loudly, heartrendingly; ambulances were rushing around, giving way only to firefighters and emergency rescue teams. Suddenly hundreds of policemen appeared on the streets, but it seemed that they didn’t really know what they were supposed to do. They mostly ran around, yelling into their walkie-talkies. At Thomas Street, Eric walked into a parking lot: the gate arm was up and the security guy must have left, for the door of his booth stood wide open…

In a tired and decadent world where such beliefs had become fatally attenuated, or where they had devolved to pro forma exercises in religious tradition, Bonhoeffer believed them utterly. And he saw that the failure on the part of the German church to believe these things made the way for the river of blood that was National Socialism. So as a result of what Bonhoeffer saw and others didn’t, he was a prophet in his time and is a prophet in ours too. Few in his day could hear what he had to say. Can we?

So, in many of his writings and in his life, Bonhoeffer raged against the idea that faith is some passive assent to intellectual theological ideas. You cannot claim you believe something if you don’t live like you believe it. God is not fooled by our claiming to believe the words of some well-crafted statement of faith—or by our dutiful church attendance—any more than your neighbors are fooled by it, or the devil is fooled by it. Bonhoeffer knew that by entering here and now into the life God calls us to live—by faith in him and obedience to him—we have already begun living eternally and are truly free. But if we try to escape the reality of human life here and now via cheap religious escapism, or via some pious action when another kind of action is what God is actually asking of us, we fail. Putting it another way, if we try on Friday to leapfrog over the cross, hoping to land safely on the turf of Easter Sunday, we will fall instead into the sepulchral abyss of Saturday, which perhaps we had forgotten about.

Easter is about salvation, and salvation is free and available to everyone. Yet so many churches put barriers around it. If our religions aren’t about the business of achieving justice in our time, in this world, for everyone, what are they doing?

plunged into work6 in a very unchristian way. An . . . ambition that many noticed in me made my life difficult. . . . Then something happened, something that has changed and transformed my life to the present day. For the first time I discovered the Bible . . . I had often preached. I had seen a great deal of the Church, and talked and preached about it—but I had not yet become a Christian. . . . I know that at that time I turned the doctrine of Jesus Christ into something of personal advantage for myself . . . I pray to God that that will never happen again. Also I had never prayed, or prayed only very little. For all my loneliness, I was quite pleased with myself. Then the Bible, and in particular the Sermon on the Mount, freed me from that. Since then everything has changed. I have felt this plainly, and so have other people about me. It was a great liberation. It became clear to me that the life of a servant of Jesus Christ must belong to the Church, and step by step it became plainer to me how far that must go. Then came the crisis of 1933. This strengthened me in it. Also I now found others who shared that aim with me. The revival of the Church and of the ministry became my supreme concern. . . . My calling is quite clear to me. What God will make of it I do not know . . . I must follow the path. Perhaps it will not be such a long one. (Phil 1:23). But it is a fine thing to have realized my calling . . . I believe its nobility will become plain to us only in coming times and events. If only we can hold out.

He pointed out that nowadays we often ask ourselves whether we still need the Church, whether we still need God. But this question, he said, is wrong. We are the ones who are questioned. The Church exists and God exists, and we are asked whether we are willing to be of service, for God needs us.

When you actually see the suffering, you must lament. And what have we seen in our cities? Many of us have made the choice to get as far from the inner city as possible—to remove ourselves from the pain and suffering.

The founding of the first black denomination came from a refusal to accept black people in the church as equal in every respect. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, former slaves, were attendees at the St. George’s Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1787.

They forgot about all of their differences and all of their frustrations, because the ones who had won the game represented all of the people of Philly.

In our own city, we do an analysis every year. We ask our community: What are the top three needs in the community? What are the three greatest influences? And what are the churches in this community doing to put a dent in those three needs

we know how much we are allowing ourselves to experience the hesed of God based on how much we give it out to others.

Then he moved on to clarify that the church does, nonetheless, play a vital role for the state. What is that role? The church must “continually ask the state whether its action can be justified as legitimate action of the state, i.e., as action which leads to law and order, and not to lawlessness and disorder.” In other words, it is the church’s role to help the state be the state. If the state is not creating an atmosphere of law and order, as Scripture says it must, then it is the job of the church to draw the state’s attention to this failing. And if on the other hand, the state is creating an atmosphere of “excessive law and order,” it is the church’s job to draw the state’s attention to that too.

I often tell the story of my first Francis Schaeffer Institute public engagement event at Borders bookstore where Jerram talked about Lewis and Narnia. During the Q & A, a lady with tears in her eyes genuinely asked/commented, “Prof Barrs, I feel guilty. What if I want to go to Narnia more than I want to go to heaven?” In return Jerram, with tears in his eyes said, “My dear, that’s not your fault. That’s our fault in the church for not adequately proclaiming the glory and majesty of the New Heaven and Earth.” Eric Mitchell Ashley

If, as Black Christians, we want to worship the Lord with the dignity and embrace that comes from being his chosen and redeemed image bearers, it’s possible to find such inclusion in a smattering of enlightened and self-sacrificial evangelical churches. However, I suspect the majority of us will find an easier time maintaining dignity and following Jesus if we avoid the cult of white Christian nationalism altogether. This may mean avoiding evangelical churches that continue to have much in common with its cultic offspring.

Rattlesnake said to the Copperhead, "You give us Vipers a real bad name, You prey on the weakest, You fight for no reason, No wonder we get blamed." Copperhead laughed and said, "Kiss my ass! You can bark but there ain't much bite. You rattle that tail, But it's fear I smell; I think you're shaking out of fright." Rattlesnake, Copperhead, Either one of them will kill you dead; We stay hungry, they get fed; And don't pass the plate around. Lie by lie, cheat by cheat, Venom in smiling teeth; They just run those forked tongues And the whole world's burning down. Copperhead said to the Rattlesnake, "If you ever wanna make it rain, We could team up Be twice as tough; Fear will be our game." Rattlesnake said to the Copperhead, "You know, we were the original sin, And I bet you my rattle against your copper That the b***h takes the apple again." Rattlesnake, Copperhead, Either one of them will kill you dead; We stay hungry, they get fed; And don't pass the plate around. Lie by lie, cheat by cheat, Venom in smiling teeth; They just run those forked tongues And the whole world's burning down. Rattlesnake said to the Copperhead, "Ain't no way they'd win, Cause the mice are sheep and the Shepherd's asleep, And the Copperhead said, "Amen".

Beyond this, we must know that when Christians have truly lived out their faith along the lines of what we are calling “religionless Christianity,” endless good has resulted throughout history. Jesus changes everything. The secular narrative has portrayed the Christian faith as many negative things, from being a colonialist, power-hungry, negative force in history to a moralistic ideology that wants to keep people from experiencing joy. Of course, bastardized versions of Christian faith have been guilty of some of these things, which we sometimes have confused with the real version of the Christian faith. But what we are calling “religionless Christianity” has always been a dramatic and revolutionary force for good. This is undeniable historical fact, but do we in the church know it well enough not to be cowed into silence on it?