January 21, 2024

Roughly one year ago, author and radio host Eric Metaxas sat down with Pastor Gary Hamrick at Cornerstone Chapel in Leesburg, Va. to discuss Metaxas’s book, Letter to the American Church.  Pastor Hamrick said the book was important and timely as he introduced Metaxas to an enthusiastic crowd.

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609268089992-0’); }); document.write(”); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().addEventListener(‘slotRenderEnded’, function(event) { if (event.slot.getSlotElementId() == “div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3028”) { googletag.display(“div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3028”); } }); }); }

I agree that Metaxas’s book is timely and important, urging Christians to break out of their silence and inaction to fight the cultural evils of our time.  The much needed message is soon to be released as a movie.

With inspiration drawn from German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Metaxas takes us back to pre-WWII Germany to show us how silence, along with an irrational separation of politics and religion, led to the perpetration of one of the greatest evils in modern history.

I became a fan of Metaxas’s latest work, seeing it as an indispensable counterargument to the 2017 book The Benedict Option, which conversely urges Christians underground to preserve their faith with a kind of “go hide until the coast is clear” defeatist vibe.

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609270365559-0’); }); document.write(”); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().addEventListener(‘slotRenderEnded’, function(event) { if (event.slot.getSlotElementId() == “div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3035”) { googletag.display(“div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3035”); } }); }); }

I was disappointed, then, to see Metaxas’s recent video assailing the mainstream evangelical church with a video titled “Dangerous END TIMES Doctrines & The Spiritual Battle Against The Deep State.”  Metaxas interviews Benjamin Thomas, author of a new book, Revelation Riddle.  Mr. Thomas said he has read “forty or fifty books” on the end times, even as he was storing up food and waiting to be rescued out of the world thanks to rapture teaching that he now believes to be false.

Let me confess that I do believe in a rapture, but like many people, I admit that I’m not 100% sure of the timing of events prophesied in the Bible.  As many of us rapture believers say — whether one believes the rapture is before, midway through, or after the tribulation — it’s not a salvation issue.  That said, if I had ever known someone like Thomas, who admits to letting a staggering number of end times books influence his life, I would have suspected him of an unhealthy obsession and warned him off the subject.

I’ve also been on the scene long enough to know that the idea of rapture-believing Christians sitting on their hands as the world burns is a hackneyed accusation.

If one rightly considers evangelist Billy Graham as historically the most influential leader of American mainstream Christianity, one should consider that he preached the rapture yet took active stances in the culture — supporting the civil rights movement, for instance, and refusing to speak before segregated audiences.  After the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in Birmingham, Ala., Graham refused to cancel an integrated meeting at Birmingham’s Legion Field Stadium.  For his radical stands, Rev. Graham was threatened by the KKK and needed police protection wherever he went.

In 1973, he told an audience in South Africa that “Christianity is not a white man’s religion and don’t let anyone tell you it’s white or black. … Christ belongs to all people.”

In 2016, Rev. Billy Graham’s successor, his son the Rev. Franklin Graham, organized a grueling “Decision America Tour,” traveling to all 50 states to pray for America even as he urged Christians “to vote for candidates who are guided by biblical principles and to get involved in the political process across all levels of government.”  Thousands gathered to hear him, even in my own city, where he told Christians to run for local and state school boards so they could fight perverse sex and sexuality teachings being forced on America’s children.  Rev. Franklin Graham believes in a pre-tribulation rapture.