Ep 92 ｜ Eric Metaxas
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Summary
Eric Metaxas, best-selling author of Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr.'s Martin Luther, joins Allie to talk about who he is, how he got started in comedy, and what it means to be a Christian in a secular world.
Transcript
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I know that it is, but I'm glad that I got just a little bit of your time.
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And I already, I have to start out with a stupid joke just because I like you that much.
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Oh, are you serious or is this part of the joke?
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Well, everything I say has this kind of like joke edge.
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No, I'm very fond of you and what you've been doing.
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Like the first time I met you, I think that was what shocked me because people think of
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you, okay, so you wrote Bonhoeffer, you wrote Martin Luther, you've written a ton of other
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I think of you as an intellectual, which you are, but you don't always think of intellectual
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I just like study stuff and then I come out and I pretend like I've known it for years,
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But the fun stuff, it is interesting because when I was, I went to a very secular university,
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And I kind of, you know, I grew up in a working class background.
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And I really discovered myself as college kind of unfolded.
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And so I was the editor of the humor magazine at Yale.
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But I was also really interested in being a writer writer.
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So I've always had this weird, you know, divergent thing.
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So I'm going to do my best to, you know, be a good steward of both weird sides of myself.
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I think that there's a lot of pressure too in this industry.
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And we're not in the exact same industry because you've written a lot of books and I'm just now
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But there is a lot of pressure to find your niche and to find the one thing that you are
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and to fit into a category so people can look at you and say, oh, Eric Metaxas, he's the
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And then when you throw something else in there, like, oh, well, I'm actually funny and I write
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It's also part of my calling, the calling that God has put on my life.
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I often say that it's my job to, I want to confuse people almost intentionally just enough
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In other words, people who think they can put me in a box, I would say, you know what?
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You can't because sometimes, I mean, on my radio show, the Eric Metaxas show, which is
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But on that show, from one day to the next, one day I might be talking about, you know,
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Mueller and Hillary Clinton and the president, you know, like, and you'd think that it's
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And then the next day it's like comedy and joking, whatever.
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And then the next day it's super faith oriented and it's about some deep Christian thing or
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even the prophetic or healing or miracles or whatever.
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So I do think a lot of times people get confused.
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And at some point, I think what's good about it is that if people pay attention long enough,
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they get the person, they get me, and then they can kind of go anywhere.
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A lot of times because of the Bonhoeffer book, people kind of, Greg Laurie, who's become
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a friend, the pastor, when he first came on my radio program, he thought of me as like
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And he was like freaked out at me joking with him.
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Because you're very sarcastic and I think people might not necessarily.
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I think that I was pleasantly surprised though because I love people that you can immediately
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Because a lot of times when you talk to smart people, they can only talk about the things
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that they are an expert in or that they know really well.
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And you kind of feel like, well, you're intimidated and you kind of feel like, okay, we can't even
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In all seriousness, I really feel like a part of this calling on my life is to be a generalist.
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Now, there's my eclectic resume from VeggieTales to Bonhoeffer to whatever it is.
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It's God's way of calling me to the center so that I can take things that you might think
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of as intellectual or highly academic and translate them for everyone because I'm not an academic
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or a hyper-intellectual, but I'm able to appreciate those things enough and it gives me a joy to bring
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it down to a level of people that they're just average folks, but they're interested in the origin
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And they can't really get it maybe from the guy who wrote the book specifically on that,
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but I can maybe interview that guy or talk about it.
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So that's, I think that's actually an important role in culture to have somebody.
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I mean, in the past they might call it a public intellectual.
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You know, I get uncomfortable with that, but I guess the idea is that it is important
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that everyone understand that, and it's one of the reasons I love Bonhoeffer, is that
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the ideas that you think are way up here are really for everyone.
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And so we need to be able to prove the truth of these highfalutin ideas by communicating
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And if you can't communicate certain ideas on a simple level, you have to ask, like,
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is there anything to them or is it just somebody blowing smoke?
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And the way they shut you up is by saying, well, you couldn't possibly understand and whatever.
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And on the contrary, if you didn't understand it, you'd know it's nonsense.
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I know this story, but not everyone might, and it's very interesting.
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Well, the book that I'm working on right now, which I hope will be out either this fall
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or in the spring, is the story of my coming to faith.
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The short version is that I was raised in the Greek Orthodox Church.
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So I was raised as a friend of God, very pro-God, but never getting any clarity on,
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is this really true or can we know whether it's true?
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It's just kind of a cultural Christian thing, and you kind of go along and go along.
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And then I go to a very, as I said, aggressively secular, PC, loony university like Yale, and
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And maybe, you know, these smart people, the leaders of the world now have discovered that
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you can't know the answer to these questions, and therefore it's not true.
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So how were your beliefs challenged while you were at Yale?
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Was it people overtly saying, wow, you're a Christian?
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Or was it just through the kind of pseudo-intellectualism that we were just talking about?
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But I think the bottom line is it's a cultural thing.
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I mean, if you go to a place like Manhattan, nobody's going to say, like, what, are you a
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They're just going to give off the vibe that we all know that that's kind of been disproven.
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And that the sophisticated people, you know, don't cling to their guns and Bibles and vote
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And then the reality is that if you don't have the confidence of your beliefs, you don't
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And pretty soon you pick up that, well, there must be more to the story, the simple faith
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And so what happened to me is I just drifted sideways into a kind of, you know, classic,
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typical, tolerant, who's to say about anything or whatever, because I wasn't really an overt
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I was sort of, you know, in some ways I was, but it was a very kind of weak faith.
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And so as soon as it was challenged, I didn't know what to do.
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So I graduated really confused and convinced, as I think many smart people are, that not only
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don't we know the answers to these things, but even if there are answers, we can't really
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No matter, and the smarter you are, the more you know that you can't know, because it's
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I'd been out of college for, you know, a little bit over three years, floundering, trying
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And to cut to the chase, the Lord very dramatically used this time of real trial in my life and depression
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and confusion, whatever, to get to me a little bit.
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And at the end of that, right around my 25th birthday, I had a dream.
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And in the dream, I won't tell it because it's too complicated, but in the dream, the
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Lord very miraculously and clearly blew my mind with his reality, his love, his prayer.
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So it's like I went to sleep wishing I could know that that were true, but pretty sure you
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And I woke up like, game over, done, I'm in, the Bible's true, Jesus is Lord, where
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I've written about it in my miracles book, of which I just gave you a copy.
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And then even easier, my website is just my name, ericmetaxas.com.
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There's a video where I, an I am second video where I tell the story.
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It was just like an assurance that you woke up with and you were like, no doubt this is real.
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If God speaks to you and you know God spoke to you, you can chit chat about the details
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for the rest of your life, but you know, because the one who made every atom in your body and
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every atom in the universe has communicated to you.
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So there was no doubt whether I could communicate that to people is another story.
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But in my mind, it was like there is absolutely no doubt.
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I have questions and things, but of course you have questions.
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But so I spent the next number of years kind of reading books and sort of playing intellectual
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catch up to find out, you know, it's kind of like if I saw Bigfoot, right?
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I smelled the disgusting thing and he's eight feet tall and then he disappears.
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So now I have to sort of say, well, I don't have any doubt what just happened.
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And now I've got to read books and kind of find out what can I know about what happened.
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But nobody's going to convince me I didn't see it, like because it was right there and
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I smelled it and it was, and this dream was like that.
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There's zero question of the reality of, and once, if you watch the video at ericandtaxis.com
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or if you read the book, you will get the details to see why it blew my mind.
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And because in the dream, God spoke to me in a way that really would have made no sense
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It's like he wove a few parts of my life together in this spectacular fairy tale dream that just,
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I knew instantly that my deepest longing is being given to me on a silver platter.
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So what did that intellectual journey look like?
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So after you see the proverbial Bigfoot and you're studying and you're trying to figure
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Well, it really was, first of all, there was an incredible joy to know that I could know
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Even if it were true, you couldn't really know.
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And I think a lot of people almost fetishize the idea of doubt, like it's cool to have doubt.
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It's like telling your five-year-old, it's cool to not be sure you can swim and maybe
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So it doesn't mean that you can't learn more every day.
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But the idea that you can't know that Jesus is God and all that stuff, I say categorically,
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You can know, just like I can know, you know, the molecular weight of beryllium or gold.
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There are certain things that I think fair-minded people would say the evidence is pretty overwhelming.
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When I wrote my book on miracles, for example, I talk about the resurrection, right?
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I was myself astounded that this thing that I believed, okay, has so much evidence that
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I would call secular evidence, historical evidence.
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So that even if you, it doesn't make sense to you and you say, it doesn't make any sense,
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I would say, okay, but look at the evidence and tell me, what do you think?
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And I think at the end of the day, a fair-minded person would look at it and go like, you know
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It doesn't seem possible that this could have happened, but the evidence is really freaking
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I didn't know that there could be evidence, but on something like that, it happened, you
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I mean, we have an infinity of documents and things from 2,000 years ago.
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So I really, when this faith thing happened, like boom overnight, I guess to know that I
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It was like, it was a giddy thing for me at first.
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And then of course, I began learning and reading and more and more.
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And the thing that to this day, I mean, I'm sure till I die, I'll feel this way.
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The fact that there is so much outrageous, wonderful evidence and so many brilliant people
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who believe in so many books and things that most people just don't know about.
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You have conversations with people and they've never heard of, you know, whether it's C.S.
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Lewis or whatever, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
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But there's this infinity of wonderful books and wonderful human beings that when you meet
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them, you realize not only aren't they crazy, but they're delightfully emotionally intelligent
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But the mainstream media would give you the impression that those people don't exist.
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So when I discovered that it did, I've had this passion all these years and always will
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to get everything that I have learned out to a more general public.
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It's why I write the books that I write, just because I think that if most people knew
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And I'm convinced they're not going to see it on the networks.
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They're probably, it's just people don't have time, you know, they want to cover the
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They want to cover politics and all this other stuff is fundamentally more important to help
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If there was one book that you would tell people to go to of yours or not of yours, someone
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who's maybe starting the journey that you were on when you were about 25, trying to figure
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it out and trying to understand, okay, is there really evidence?
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I wrote three books with the title, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God But We're
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The first one is called Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God But We're Afraid
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The second one is called Everything Else You Always Wanted to Know About God But We're
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And then the third one is Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God But We're Afraid
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to Ask, the Jesus edition, which talks about, you know, the resurrection,
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all that stuff. So those are real primers on the basics, kind of a fun Q&A for somebody
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who's just like, I don't know. The Miracles book is also a very good one for that because
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I get into the scientific evidence for how do we know whether everything just came into
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being randomly or that there was an intelligence behind it. The evidence is freaky. It is so freaky.
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And what amazes me is that most intelligent Christians haven't been exposed to it.
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And I think, you know, a lot of people say, well, I'm going through like a really great
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Bible study on Ephesians right now. And I go, that's great. But if you're in the workplace
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and somebody challenges you that science kind of disproves faith or there's so many
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planets in the universe, the idea that we're the only ones here and that some God created it,
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that's just nonsense. You know, and you think most people don't know how to respond to that.
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I have been, as I say, nothing less than astounded at what good materials there are available. And
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again, part of what I do is I'm a popularizer. So like I read books by somebody like John Lennox
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or by Stephen Meyer or by Hugh Ross. I've had them all on my radio program.
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By having them on my radio program is one way to get their, you know, information out there. But in my
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book, Miracles and other books I've written, I kind of give you the bite-sized version of it.
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And in the Miracles book, I talk about the origin of the universe and all this stuff in a way that,
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you know, as I say, your average reader is going to be able to understand it. But it is
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so astounding that I wish I could, I mean, frankly, they should be teaching this stuff in every school
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in America, not just in Christian schools, because the evidence is overwhelming. And so that's my
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passion. It's like, look, it's true. If you can rebut it, good luck. But they,
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they act as though, oh, it's already been rebutted. We don't even need to talk about it.
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It's like, oh, really? I think you're afraid to look into it because it's going to scare you to
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death. In fact, Christopher Hitchens, obviously before he died, said, somebody asked him, what
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is the greatest argument on the other side for God? And he rather honestly said, oh, there's no
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question about it. It's the fine-tuned universe, blah, blah, blah. And he said that that's the one that
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gives all of us on our side pause that we don't really have an answer for it.
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But they rarely communicate that pause or even the possibility that it could be out there.
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No, not only that. Not only that. But when I wrote my Miracles book, I wrote an op-ed on what
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we're talking about. They titled it, Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God. And it
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went into the Wall Street Journal. It went insanely viral, like nothing that I ever dreamt, like 650,000
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shares, like the kind of thing that is just nuts, right? Why am I saying this? I'm saying this because
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the amount of people who wrote, the number of people who wrote against what I wrote, and in their
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first couple of sentences were like, all this stuff has been disproved years ago. And it's been, it's
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like, we've already answered this, right? And I thought, wait a second, Christopher Hitchens just
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said, no, you didn't. Christopher Hitchens said, this is the one that gives you pause. So if you want to
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make some kind of argument of sophistry and twist it around, whatever, have at it. But if you're
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honest, you can't dismiss this. This is the one thing that to most scientistic materialists is
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horrifying because they don't have an answer. So you know what they come up with? The big one is
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they come up with the multiverse theory. They say like, oh, we have no evidence for it, but we're
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pretty sure there's an infinity of universes. And this is just the one where everything kind of worked
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out perfectly. Oh, and by the way, we happen to be in that one. That requires infinitely more faith
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than the wildest Christian claim you've ever heard. But who has the guts to face that in the academic
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environment and so on and so forth? So it's important we push because the evidence is there.
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My question is, how does someone say someone read your article and said, okay, I believe that there is
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a directed force behind this fine-tuned universe because it's too hard for me to believe, like you
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said, that this all is just kind of random. It just doesn't make that much sense because I was
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actually just listening to a podcast that made this argument. How do you get from there to the God of
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the Bible? Why isn't it some just random creator we don't know? Well, I mean, I think to be fair,
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you don't have to. No, there's some people, they'll stop there. But like anything else,
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if you want to know what this intelligent force might be, and if you're open-minded, and it takes
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courage to be open-minded, but if you want to know, there is ample evidence that would, again,
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logically suggest. I'm not saying, you know when people say like faith is a leap in the dark,
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that is totally wrong. Not true, yeah. I mean, if anything, faith is a leap in the light. You're not
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meant to believe things where you say, well, I don't know if it's true, but I believe it.
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Do you think God would ask us to believe something? He only tells us to believe what is true, okay?
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And so there are all kinds of evidences for these things, but it depends on each person's journey.
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My journey was kind of weird. Like I already knew that Jesus is Lord and the Bible is true and all
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that stuff before I had the intellectual evidence for it. But that's not to say I didn't have intellectual
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evidence. It's just that the kind of intellectual evidence that I had is harder to articulate.
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But anytime you believe something, it's disingenuous to make it sound like, well,
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I don't have any reason. I just believe what I believe. Then you shouldn't believe it. Like you
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have to know. It's kind of like, again, if somebody said to me, like, you know your father,
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like you've met your father and stuff. I go like, yeah. Like I had breakfast with him. I just talked
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to him on the phone. They go, well, how do you know you know? And it gets into a kind of absurd
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conversation. When I get in my car and turn on the thing, like I know it's going to go forward.
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People say, how do you know you know? That becomes sophistry and silly. You know, if people don't
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want to know, they kind of hide in that kind of stuff. But there's so much evidence for the Bible.
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I mean, you could get into the archeology. You could get into the manuscript evidence. The evidence
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for the, you know, what's called the historicity of the Bible or the veracity. It's huge. And the
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funny thing is there's way more today than there was 40 years ago, 50 years ago. Like it, the evidence,
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one of the ways you know something is true is that the evidence for it increases rather than
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decreases. Kind of like talking about Darwin, right? Darwin said 150 years ago, you know,
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I think the fossil record as time goes by, we're going to uncover more and more of these linking forms
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between, you know, we found this and we found this and over years we'll find this stuff. Not only hasn't
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it happened, precisely the opposite has happened. We found more of this stuff and more of this stuff
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and nothing here. And so after 150 years, you have to start saying, okay, the evidence actually seems
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to be pointing in the opposite direction. That if there was this thing called evolution, that it was
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directed by intelligent force, it couldn't have happened by random mutations the way, you know. And so it's
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really, it takes courage to be honest because some people are scared by the implications.
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And it's almost, I mean, it is like a religion without a name. I was just watching the Flat Earth
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documentary on Netflix. I'm not sure if you've seen that. There's a whole Flat Earth community on
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YouTube, you know, they're convinced. And they show them doing these experiments to prove that the
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earth is flat. In the experiments, they realize, oh, dang, the earth is actually rotating. This ruins
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everything. But that reminds me of what you were just saying. All this evidence comes out, but
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they've already got their conclusion. And they're not going to let go of it because just like Flat
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Earth is this religion, this community, this cult, and it's who they are now. It's the same thing with
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Darwinism or the neo-atheist, whatever they're called now. It's, you know, it's who they are. It's
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their identity. It's their worth. And it's their church.
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You have said it. And that's why I think we have to push people and say,
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why do you cling to this faith when the evidence points against it? You would do me the honor of
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telling me that my faith is nonsense if the evidence points against it. Like, let's have a
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fair conversation. But we have to be honest that most people are afraid to face those kinds of facts
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because they do have a predetermined worldview that they're clinging to. And that's normal too.
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In other words, just because a few facts come in doesn't mean you throw away your paradigm. But at
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some point, the welter of evidence says, maybe you should begin looking more, be more open to the
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situation. So again, but that takes courage. Yeah. I think the cop-out typically is, at least at first,
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is, well, I'm not going to believe anything that is not materially proven. Everything that I need to
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know about the universe and what I feel can be seen in the material world. But we know that's true
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if you look at things like beauty, meaning, morality, purpose, love, all of these things that
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aren't just chemicals in our brain or neurons in our brain firing off because there's really no
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Darwinian explanation for why these things would exist if natural selection is really all there is.
00:24:46.160
Once you get someone to admit that, okay, not everything that you know to be true, you know beauty
00:24:51.740
to be true, you know love to be true, you know them to be actually real in your mind.
00:24:56.960
Yeah. They're not just chemical reactions. Once you get them to admit that, then it opens the
00:25:00.960
possibility that, okay, maybe not everything can be explained by what I see physically.
00:25:05.680
Well, even the concept, even this idea that science can explain everything is, are you ready for this?
00:25:13.460
It's utterly unscientific. Science is just science. Science cannot tell you why the earth exists.
00:25:24.440
It can tell you that it exists. It can describe it and describe it and describe it. But I think what
00:25:28.840
horrifies scientists is that even science can point you beyond science. In other words, if science,
00:25:37.320
science can't tell me what happened before the Big Bang, but it can point me to the mystery of this
00:25:44.160
moment when the universe comes into creation and it can lead fair-minded people to say, wow, that
00:25:51.400
suggests a number of things. Now you can't go back there with a test tube and calipers and figure out
00:25:57.200
what happened before. So you've bumped up against the limit of science, but science nonetheless can point
00:26:04.300
beyond the limit and suggest that there are things beyond the physical universe, even though they
00:26:10.640
can't prove it. So it's really a bizarre conundrum because you have a lot of scientists who are
00:26:15.780
themselves reaching way past science. And then when you say something that they think unscientific,
00:26:21.400
they kind of say, well, that's unscientific. And you want to say, well, excuse me, you're being
00:26:24.520
unscientific. And somehow through the tools of science, suggesting that science is all there is
00:26:30.160
and the physical universe is all there is, you can't even know that. So if you want to be honest,
00:26:33.800
you have to at least say, we can't know. But rather than be scientific and honest about it
00:26:40.000
and say, we can't know, they overreach and say, we know. And if you disagree, you're stupid and
00:26:45.480
you're unscientific. It's like a really weird place that, and I'm sure that there are a lot
00:26:51.140
of scientists who kind of get this, but they're maybe afraid to speak out or something because
00:26:54.840
the scientific community, you know, kind of like the political climate, people are so aggressive and
00:26:59.300
nasty that they, if they don't have an argument, they just try to shut you up.
00:27:03.200
Yeah. If someone were to ask you, okay, fine, but why Christianity? Why is Christianity different
00:27:11.820
There are many reasons. I guess the first one I would say is Christianity straight up says,
00:27:19.720
in history, this thing happened where a human being comes into the world and they say,
00:27:28.840
was sent by God, in fact, was God in the human flesh, that he died on the cross, that this was
00:27:36.120
part of God's mysterious, strange plan. And then he rose from the dead, not from the sick,
00:27:42.880
not from the coma, from the dead, that God raised a human being to life as a way of showing all kinds
00:27:51.680
of things, his power over death, that he is life. And also as a way of showing the power of love
00:27:59.780
over hate, the power of good over evil. There's an infinity of things that we say happened in history.
00:28:08.760
And, you know, all serious Christians have always said, as Paul said, if that didn't happen,
00:28:14.920
the whole thing might as well be thrown in the garbage.
00:28:17.220
So anytime anybody says, well, Christianity teaches the same stuff as this or this, I would say,
00:28:22.320
no, no, no, no, no. Christians have had the guts to say, this stuff does not matter if that didn't
00:28:31.100
happen. If that didn't happen, then we're just, we're talking about nothing. So Islam, Judaism,
00:28:39.380
any other kind of religion says that didn't happen. And so I think we have to be real clear that that
00:28:45.200
is the one clear difference. It's not really an ideological difference per se,
00:28:51.240
but it becomes ideological. But I guess that we can't pretend like, well, it's all about some kind
00:28:56.080
of teaching. And no, truth is truth. And, you know, good teaching and wisdom are wisdom.
00:29:02.300
But you can have that without Jesus and without, you know, you can talk about those things. But the
00:29:09.040
Christianity and the Christian religion have always said that at the heart of all of that
00:29:15.960
is a person, that God is a person, that he came into the world, into history as a person.
00:29:25.040
And therefore, that is different than talking about a God presence, a divinity, a Godhead,
00:29:32.700
a Christ consciousness, whatever. All that stuff is very different than what the Bible teaches.
00:29:38.840
But I would also say that the Bible and the Christian faith makes more sense than a lot
00:29:45.020
of the other religions in terms of the idea of forgiveness. How do you deal with evil in the
00:29:49.280
world? You know, all that stuff. And then the most fundamental thing, I would say, Christianity
00:29:53.200
is the only religion that is an anti-religion religion. What I mean by that is that every religion,
00:29:59.600
since the dawn of time, since people were like, you know, killing chickens and covering themselves
00:30:05.220
with chicken blood and whatever. Every human being has had a sense since the fall that there's a
00:30:11.080
problem, that we are somehow separated from whatever it is up there, that we have this kind
00:30:16.960
of guilt that we can't bridge the gap between us and the gods or Godhead or divinity. Every human
00:30:24.220
society has acknowledged that and then tried to deal with it in different ways by doing X and Y and Z
00:30:28.600
and then do X, Y, Z again and doing that. And there's this kind of pecking order. How do I work
00:30:33.480
my way up to bridge the gap? Maybe only the shaman can do it and whatever. And so everybody is trying
00:30:38.420
to bridge the gap. And even Judaism is effectively trying to deal with that. There are these religious
00:30:43.620
rituals and so on and so forth. And then Jesus comes into the world and says, okay, now do you realize
00:30:49.700
you can't do it? Now do you realize that no human being through human effort can bridge the infinite
00:30:56.880
gap, which you know is there. Therefore, God has come into the world to bridge the gap for you.
00:31:04.300
And if you accept Jesus by faith, then you are by faith in him enabled in yourself to bridge the gap
00:31:14.160
with him and to be at peace with the God from whom you have been distant and with whom you've had this
00:31:23.160
broken relationship. All of that can be healed, but God has to initiate it. So in a way, Jesus ends all
00:31:29.760
religion. And so even the Christian religion can become a kind of a counterfeit of itself where it
00:31:36.400
becomes like yet another religion. And of course, that's what Jesus came to abolish. So you have all
00:31:41.640
these kinds of heresies within Christianity which are tending toward these other religions where they
00:31:47.700
say, well, here's the pecking order. Here's what you do. You do this and this and this and this and this
00:31:50.700
and this. So it's on you again, right? And Martin Luther, of course, kind of rediscovers this 15
00:31:56.940
centuries after, you know, Jesus and says, hey, we have slid, the Christian faith and the church has
00:32:03.740
slid into doing the very thing that we ought to know Jesus came to abolish. And we need to get back
00:32:11.380
to that and understand it's only by faith in him and it's only he who can bridge the gap. And so that,
00:32:17.100
you know, that's, you talk about fundamental difference between the Christian faith and
00:32:20.800
every other religion. It's like pretty big. Okay. So you mentioned Martin Luther and him saying,
00:32:26.660
okay, we've gotten into this legalistic thing where we're saying you got to do these things in
00:32:31.080
order to get closer to God or to be holy, whatever. And he said, that's not, that's not the gospel.
00:32:36.980
Tell me what he did for those who don't know. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I wrote, you know,
00:32:43.160
the Bonhoeffer biography and the Wilberforce biography. And I was sure that I would never
00:32:47.020
write another biography. And I had two friends, Greg Thornberry and my friend Marcus Speaker,
00:32:52.160
who said, no, no, Eric, you have to write the 500th anniversary is coming up. You have to write
00:32:56.100
the biography of Luther. And they went on and on and on. And the way they convinced me was by helping
00:33:03.180
me to see what I had not seen before. I'm always happy to confess my ignorance. People think that I've
00:33:06.920
known this stuff forever. No, they convinced me of the influence of Luther, that what he did
00:33:13.740
absolutely changed the world and created the modern universe in which we live, right? For good and for
00:33:19.700
ill. I never really saw that. And so it intrigued me. And then the second thing is like, he's such a
00:33:25.740
funny maniac that I knew writing about him would be fun. Yeah. And I always joke around that he's such
00:33:30.600
maniac. He makes Trump look like Mike Pence. Yeah. He is incredible. So if Martin Luther had
00:33:35.880
a Twitter, it might be bad. Well, he did have a Twitter. It was his pamphlets. No, I mean,
00:33:40.720
there are weird parallels. But before we get into that, or, you know, we don't have to, but it would
00:33:46.120
be fun to. But that's what convinced me to write about him is that I thought, oh my goodness, I've
00:33:50.600
missed the import. And you cannot underscore it. I say without doubt, he's the most influential
00:33:57.540
person in 2,000 years apart from Jesus. There's no doubt about it. He did not set out to be
00:34:04.820
influential, but he ends up being influential. Why? Because just what you were saying, he basically
00:34:11.080
frees the gospel to do its thing in history. You have, you know, you kind of wonder, why does God do
00:34:19.260
things the way he does? Why would he allow us to fall and then to have these, you know, centuries,
00:34:24.800
centuries, millennia of whatever it is before the Messiah comes into the world? And then
00:34:30.360
you think, well, okay, and why does the Messiah ever come into the world at this point in history?
00:34:34.400
And then why isn't it all over then? Why do we have to have 15 centuries of whatever before
00:34:42.360
Luther comes in and says, oh, by the way, we've been getting all this wrong? And effectively,
00:34:46.880
he frees the gospel. Now, the gospel is freedom. So it's like he frees freedom to fly out
00:34:52.800
into history and to touch everything it had not yet touched. And the number one thing
00:34:57.720
is this idea that if I'm to have a personal relationship with God, I have a personal
00:35:04.960
responsibility. I can't point to the priest or the governor or the prince or the king or anything.
00:35:13.900
God says, no, no, no, that's over. Now you have a direct relationship with me and you talk to me.
00:35:22.100
It doesn't mean you don't look to other people for wisdom and that you don't know everything, but
00:35:25.360
fundamentally, there's this relationship. Now that ought to have existed from the beginning,
00:35:30.420
but somehow it got obscured in 15 centuries of history. And as we know, because human beings
00:35:35.940
are sinners, we drifted so far away that we created what God had come to abolish, which is this kind of
00:35:42.480
system of how you get to God that wasn't even very different from, you know, the Jewish system.
00:35:50.540
It's just this, it's the same kind of thing, except now with this patina of Christianity over
00:35:55.220
it. And so Luther, in a sense, sees this and not intentionally sparks a revolution that we call
00:36:04.260
the Reformation. I mean, he, it's almost like you pull a thread. Nobody else was willing to pull the
00:36:08.680
thread. He says, well, I think I have to, and let's see what happens. And I'm going to trust God. And he
00:36:13.580
pulls the thread and the whole sweater unravels. And, you know, you have a naked guy without a sweater
00:36:19.420
and you got a lot of trouble and the whole world turns upside down. And basically, has the Reformation
00:36:25.020
ever been described as a naked guy without a sweater? I'll have to look. I'll have to look.
00:36:29.800
But it is kind of funny because he didn't intend to do that, but he was willing to do what he thought
00:36:34.200
God called him to do. And so what Luther did at the heart of it is said, I'm going to trust God rather
00:36:42.520
than man. And I'm going to trust that God, being a God of love and mercy, that even if I screwed this
00:36:49.640
up, he wants me to, in my heart, to trust him first. And not to be afraid of what man can do to
00:36:57.240
me, burn me at the stake, but to be too afraid of what he will do to me if I completely blow him off
00:37:02.440
and worry about what these men can do to me. I'm going to worry about what God is going to do. And
00:37:07.100
even if it's not a fear thing of hell, but it's the idea that I have this joy of serving God and
00:37:12.840
I believe he's going to see my heart. And if I got it wrong or if they're going to put me to death,
00:37:17.460
I know why I'm doing what I'm doing. And by the way, he had studied scripture so much that he didn't
00:37:22.200
think like, hey, who's to say? It was pretty clear to him that they had missed this. But so there's a
00:37:27.300
number of things that happen. One of them is that for the first time, he sees daylight between truth
00:37:33.680
and power. Now imagine this, right? The church, the Western church, the Western church had over
00:37:42.140
the centuries amassed complete power so that if you wanted to know what is true, you had to go to them.
00:37:50.580
So Luther, by reading the Bible, and by the way, nobody was really reading the Bible except Luther
00:37:55.020
for reasons I go into in the book, he discovers that, okay, I see some daylight. I see a crack. I see
00:38:02.020
light coming through this crack. We need to address that. We need to patch up the crack or
00:38:06.580
figure this out. As in, this is what the Catholic church is teaching. Here's what I'm reading in
00:38:09.900
the Bible. There's a gap between the two. And it wasn't even necessarily what they were teaching.
00:38:13.480
It was, they might be teaching the right thing, but the practice of it was harmful. You know,
00:38:19.500
it's not like, I mean, of course, some of what they were teaching was wrong, but it's almost like
00:38:24.620
it wasn't like official doctrine. It was sort of like side doctrine or how they interpreted the
00:38:29.300
doctrine. He says, listen. Like, is indulgences an example of that? Yes. Indulgences is an example
00:38:34.220
of that, where you could argue that there's nothing so wrong with the concept of indulgences
00:38:37.940
in its pure form. But very quickly, it becomes a source of income. It's just like the federal
00:38:42.140
government. When you have a tax, okay, you say, we're going to have a temporary tax to do this or
00:38:46.320
to do that, to raise money for this or for that project or something like that. Great.
00:38:50.680
But we know what happens. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. When there's money
00:38:55.480
involved, suddenly that tax becomes permanent. And suddenly they say, you know what? If we could
00:39:00.620
raise this much money with that tax, why wouldn't we double that tax? And why wouldn't we make
00:39:05.160
everybody pay that tax? Not just these people, but it becomes a revenue stream. Human sin nature
00:39:11.080
takes over. So this thing called indulgences, which you could argue is a very simple way of saying to
00:39:17.200
somebody, look, okay, you've sinned. I mean, we could use more of this in the evangelical church,
00:39:21.440
right? Instead of saying, hey, there's grace, man. No, there's not grace. There's
00:39:25.280
Jesus dying on the cross, which is a painful, costly grace. So when you sin, you should take
00:39:32.000
it seriously and want to make reparations, for example, right? I mean, if I murder somebody,
00:39:38.560
you don't say, hey, there's grace, man. It's cool. It might be cool in terms of your salvation,
00:39:43.100
but in terms of your life and the life of people around you, you'd say, I know I can never make that
00:39:47.920
right, but I want to do everything I can to show my repentance. I want to write a book about it and
00:39:56.540
have the funds go to the people who've been affected by this. He says, I'm going to pay
00:40:01.500
the poor. Yes, I'm going to pay back the people. So that's a biblical principle. And so the Catholic
00:40:07.160
church, in part, would say like, okay, you sinned, so you pray this prayer. And I can imagine a very
00:40:13.580
loving, fatherly priest who cares for the soul of somebody and he says, okay, you've done this sin.
00:40:20.460
Pray these prayers and why don't you pay something to the church, you know, to show that you're serious
00:40:27.640
and it'll go to God's work. It can all be on the up and up for that person's soul, but pretty
00:40:33.300
quickly it became corrupt. And so suddenly it was like, hey, that money you're going to pay to the
00:40:37.260
church, let's triple it. And let's start preaching indulgence sermons to get money to pay for St.
00:40:42.980
Peter's in Rome. And by the way, St. Peter's in Rome is a great thing. So it's all good, right?
00:40:46.800
Yeah. Well, it became really bad and really wicked. And Luther saw a number of these things. It
00:40:53.120
ironically didn't really start with indulgences. I mean, the whole thing was kicked off with
00:40:56.320
indulgences, but he saw a number of little issues and he said, let's do the right thing and try to fix it.
00:41:02.480
Yeah. And what happened when he went to fix it, when he sees this daylight between what is true
00:41:09.080
and what the power says is true, and he says, we want to fix this, their response was, shut up.
00:41:16.900
Yeah. And if you don't shut up, we're going to kill you. How's that, Luther? Shut up. And he said,
00:41:22.220
whoa, if you're telling me to shut up, I'm starting to now wonder, do you care about truth or do you just
00:41:29.360
care about power? And that's when he got more and more radicalized, so to speak. He kept thinking,
00:41:37.160
who am I dealing with? I love the church, but these forces in the church seem to be forces of
00:41:42.100
Antichrist. So I've got to speak louder and be less conciliatory. I've got to wake people up.
00:41:47.960
So it becomes a kind of a war. But at the heart of it is this idea, which we now take for granted,
00:41:53.120
the difference between truth and power. We now know that one person could have the truth and
00:41:58.260
that power could try to crush it. We know there's this thing as illegitimate power, okay? If I'm in
00:42:02.980
North Korea and I say, hey, this is true, and they say, no, no, no, you don't get to say what's true.
00:42:08.020
Only we get to say what's true. Well, in the West and in the Christian world,
00:42:12.700
that was not rectified until the Reformation. The Reformation said even a common man
00:42:19.280
might see the truth of God and the powers that be in the church might get it wrong. So they didn't
00:42:25.540
wipe away hierarchy, but they said, we've got to rethink this here because truth is not malleable.
00:42:31.840
Human beings can get it wrong. The church at the time was trying to say to Luther, no,
00:42:36.180
the Pope can never get it wrong and the church can never get it wrong. Now, to some extent,
00:42:42.800
that might be true. And it was today, the Catholic church would say that if the Pope is speaking
00:42:46.940
ex-cathedra, which he almost never, ever, ever does, that it's the Holy Spirit, kind of like a
00:42:51.480
church council where we say that what happened in Nicaea or whatever, that that was the Holy Spirit.
00:42:55.600
It wasn't just a bunch of people voting. But Luther was seeing that they're starting to blur the lines,
00:43:01.740
they're getting confused, truth cannot change, and the word of God is the one way we know what is true.
00:43:08.700
And so this tiny little thing sparked the Reformation and really gave birth to the West because once
00:43:14.440
you allow the possibility that the church is wrong and that we have to start a church
00:43:21.240
that gets this right, by allowing for the possibility of a second church, you've just opened the door
00:43:26.920
to 10,000 churches. You've just changed everything. And so now it becomes a personal thing.
00:43:34.980
What church do I go to and how do I know who's teaching the truth? That's called freedom.
00:43:39.980
And it's a terrifying thing, but it's at the very heart of the gospel of Jesus. And so Luther
00:43:46.100
brings that into the world. And the ramifications in history go way beyond what I've just said,
00:43:50.540
which you know because you read the book and you know about this. It goes everywhere, including
00:43:55.040
to the issue of self-government and American-style liberty. We could not have American-style
00:44:00.500
self-government and liberty. The United States could not exist if Luther had not pulled the thread.
00:44:04.880
Yes. I tweeted something along those lines the other day. And my Catholic friends who I respect,
00:44:11.960
some of whom you know. And I'm a very pro-Catholic, non-Catholic. I say that clearly
00:44:16.900
because it's true. I am a very pro-Catholic, non-Catholic. But there's some people get very
00:44:21.240
hidebound on these issues and they, you know. Yes. And the pushback typically is with the
00:44:27.280
Protestant Reformation from the Catholic side, again, Catholics that I love and respect and know are very
00:44:31.760
smart and have studied this stuff, is that, okay, one, no, the Protestant Reformation did not help
00:44:37.280
build the West. It was actually the Catholic Church that did it solely. And all the Protestant
00:44:41.120
Reformation did was divide. And now, look, you have all of these different denominations, they say.
00:44:48.060
And how can you say that's a good thing? My response would be kind of what you said. That's
00:44:51.840
always the risk that you have in freedom. And by the way, we're not saying it's a good thing. We're
00:44:55.560
simply saying that it is what it is. In other words, what people who were the enemies of Luther
00:45:00.520
predicted would happen did happen. And so it is this calculation. You say, okay, we're going to
00:45:06.880
give the possibility for people to believe whatever they want. And some of them will believe the wrong
00:45:13.840
thing. And, well, it's really just what you said. It's called freedom. So then the question becomes,
00:45:20.040
as William F. Buckley used to say, the question becomes how we,
00:45:25.520
how we draw the line. Because at some point we know that it is impossible to coerce someone
00:45:36.520
toward the truth. That somehow we have to choose truth and God freely. So as a parent, you'll be a
00:45:48.160
parent very soon. Actually, you already are. When you're a parent, you have to think, what can I force
00:45:56.020
my, in my case, my daughter to believe or do? And what am I going to have to trust God with?
00:46:04.120
That is the challenge. Because if you could force your child to believe everything that's true and
00:46:09.620
to be perfect, on some level you would. But then you realize, I can't. I only have a certain freedom.
00:46:15.520
And you could say the same thing about the church and about governments. They can only do so much.
00:46:19.800
And the genius of the founders of the United States of America was that they understood this.
00:46:24.980
They said that in order for freedom to flourish, in order for faith to flourish and virtue to flourish,
00:46:33.980
we have to make it absolutely free and uncoerced. If we establish a religion and we tell everyone
00:46:40.700
they have to go to this church or that church or not to go to church or to go to a mosque or whatever
00:46:45.220
it is, if we do that and we use our power to force people to do that, to the extent that we use our
00:46:54.240
power to do that, we really squelch the authenticity of those expressions of faith. It has to be free.
00:47:01.060
And we know that when we don't coerce it, some people will blow it off altogether. But that's freedom.
00:47:06.260
And that's something that we have to trust. It's almost like trusting the free market.
00:47:10.280
The free market doesn't guarantee us that everything is going to get better and better.
00:47:15.240
But it says that this is our only shot at that.
00:47:18.400
And so if you have a virtuous population, a virtuous market, virtuous citizenry,
00:47:23.380
that we want good things, the market will give us good things.
00:47:26.200
If you have a perverse population, they will want better and better pornography and drugs
00:47:35.420
and whatever. And the market will deliver that. So at the heart of everything we're talking about
00:47:40.680
is this idea that we have to have virtue for democracy to work, for freedom and self-government
00:47:46.380
to work. We have to have virtue for the market, the free market to work. All these things cannot
00:47:52.240
be coerced. And this is to me the ineffable genius of what we call liberty. And it comes right out of
00:47:59.500
the gospel that God says, there are no guarantees. You are free to walk away from me. You're free to
00:48:05.640
walk toward me. But no one can coerce you in toward walking toward me. We all know stories of people who
00:48:11.140
were raised in a very strict, let's say, fundamentalist kind of Christian environment who
00:48:14.680
rebelled against it. There is a real line. And I think in history, the founders, they tried to get
00:48:20.760
this right. And they tried to say, we can encourage faith. We can encourage virtue. But at the end of
00:48:25.900
the day, it's a cultural thing. It is not a government thing. It's not a state thing that we
00:48:30.120
can force. The Reformation enabled us to see that. And it came with a lot of downside. And I'd be the
00:48:37.020
first to say that my Catholic friends are right about a lot of that. But I think that it nonetheless
00:48:41.340
happened and in part happened precisely because of the Catholic churches in that period getting this
00:48:49.740
wrong. Yeah. And they were kind of like the coercive parent who is so overbearing that it forces the
00:48:56.000
kids to rebel. And there's a scripture, right, that parents don't exasperate your children. Yeah. That's a
00:49:01.100
biblical principle that if you are so threatening and heavy handed, at some point, that kid's going to run
00:49:06.720
away from home. And that's part of the story of the Reformation. Yeah. I think a great way for people to start
00:49:11.720
getting educated is reading some of your books. So can you tell everyone where to find you?
00:49:17.200
What? Yeah. That's like, that's my favorite interview question. It's like, and how can we
00:49:22.360
get this lovely product? Actually, no, in all seriousness, I'm passionate about my books and I
00:49:27.940
wish I could give them to everyone free. I really can't. I do that when I can. But my website is
00:49:33.380
ericmetaxas.com. Obviously, you can get them all over there, barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com,
00:49:39.120
whatever. But I think that my If You Can Keep It book, as I say, it's the sort of thing that I so
00:49:45.140
wish I could give to every American because in writing it, I understood that this is absolutely
00:49:50.820
crucial. We need to know this stuff and we need to teach this stuff. We need to get excited about it.
00:49:55.500
You can get that anywhere. But I mean, I feel similarly about most of my books, honestly, because
00:50:00.100
I feel an urgency about these things. The time is short and we need to, well, let's put it this way.
00:50:10.200
We should be happy that there are these wonderful answers. We don't have to say what's happening,
00:50:15.560
what's going on. I really believe God is always on the throne. Even if things go to hell, God is still
00:50:20.180
on the throne and He still commands me to rejoice in Him, to be anxious for nothing, whatever. Like,
00:50:25.680
we need to know that, first of all. And then, you know, speaking as a Christian, I say that
00:50:30.160
if we don't fight for what we know is just and true and beautiful, there are people whose lives
00:50:38.540
are depending on it. There are poor people right now who are going to grow up in the culture that
00:50:42.780
we allow to exist. And I think if you care about them, you have to take this stuff seriously. And
00:50:47.980
that if the church can't be the church and get excited and involved in this stuff,
00:50:52.160
it really is on us. So keeping the republic is on us. And it will not be kept unless we keep it.
00:50:59.880
And so I just want to say to everybody, that's my life. That's what I care about. And so I just hope
00:51:05.180
that I can inspire people along those lines. Yeah. Gosh, there's so much more I want to talk
00:51:08.860
about. I think it's especially important for Christians because unfortunately, we see a large
00:51:13.300
section of even previously conservative evangelicalism moving towards the left. And we could spend a whole
00:51:20.500
episode on that. So maybe we'll do that next time. You know what? I would really love to do that.
00:51:25.940
It's so much fun to talk to you. And these are so important things. But I would love to do that if
00:51:31.380
we can do that, Allie. That would be fun. It's important. Yes. Well, thank you so much, Eric. And
00:51:36.780
everyone, go check out erikmitaxes.com. And they can follow you on Twitter if they want to.
00:51:41.660
I'm on Twitter. I'm on Facebook. I'm on Instagram. And most importantly,
00:51:45.680
I have a daily radio show where I have on the most amazing guests ever. If you sign up for my
00:51:51.100
weekly email at erikmitaxes.com, we'll weekly send you details of every episode so you can just click
00:51:58.080
and listen to it. And a lot of it's on video right now. I have interviewed amazing people from way on
00:52:03.940
the left to way on the right. I just did a huge thing with Milo Yiannopoulos. I know. I don't like
00:52:09.120
that, but. Crazy. No, I know. But I'm saying like I am, I run the gamut. I interview people
00:52:13.920
with whom I disagree. Yeah. And well, you'll see. You'll see. It's. Yes. I mean, you're never
00:52:20.220
going to be bored watching or listening to your show. That's for sure. And I think that's good,
00:52:23.780
especially for us millennials. Well, thank you so much for listening. And we will see you here on Monday.