A Peace Child Brings Healing to the Nations

A Marind tribe sharing a southern border with the Sawi tribes of Papua, New Guinea

The Sawi, or Sawuy, are a tribal people of Western New Guinea, Indonesia. They were known to be cannibalistic headhunters as recently as the 1950s. They speak the Sawi language, which belongs to the Trans-New Guinea language family.

Sawi, or Sawuy, is a language of the Sawi people of the Trans–New Guinea phylum spoken in sago swamps in the southwestern parts of the Indonesian province of Papua. Of the neighboring languages, it is most closely related to the Awyu languages to the east.

Sawi is an inflecting language and uses both inflections of the stem and suffixes to indicate person, number, and tense.

A peace child offering among the Sawi tribe of Papua, New Guinea

Journey into the Unknown

I remember reading Don Richardson's story of Peace Child either in my late teens or early twenties and thinking how wonderful his use of the cultural elements he lived within to communicate Jesus not by his own Western standards but by the tribe's own standards whom he had befriended.

Yet in another sense I also remembered how the Sawi tribe was "fattening him and his family up" with good fellowship and tribal affection as they were preparing Don, his wife, and youngest child Steve, for a rite of death. Though Don never mentions this in his journal the tension was evidently there by his recounts of what he was witnessing. The Sawi tribe he was living amongst were a Papua, New Guinea tribe of Indonesia well know for their cannibalism.

It was through a cannibalistic incident between the Sawi tribes where Richardson first saw a glimmer of how to share the deep relevance of Jesus to his machiavellian hosts which might bring a deep spiritual meaning to upsetting both the human soul and tribal practices of a culture devoted to premeditated murder upon one another. And it was through this biblical form of typology that opened blinded tribal eyes to see the atonement of Jesus between God and man.

But rather than ruin or spoil the import of Richard's story I'll leave it to the reader to pick up an old copy and re-explore through Don Richardson's missionary eyes the perils he and his family had entered into amid the discoveries they had made having survived their first Sawi encounters. Peace Child reads simply and quickly, but within the words of the page lies a deep sublimity providing a transitional context between people and tribes of unlike cultures looking to find common ground with one another.

Context

Which brings me to my last thought of the day. Context. If, like Don Richardson, we are seeking a way to share the gospel of God's love through Jesus in a meaningful way, it is by listening and learning from within whatever cultural context (of community context) we find ourselves in. This is where an evangelist or missionary, pastor or discipler, might begin. It will never be obvious at first but with time and insight it might become obvious.

The key to Richardson's insight was that he came to live and work within the Sawi tribes. When he did, he found God's insight into a deeply formative tradition held within the very cornerstone of the Sawi tribes. An identity heightened by lies and deception before killing of another human being. It was this very cornerstone of their tribal identity the Lord reveal to Don that he might use it's same evil to share God's love.

Had Richardson brought his own culture into the tribe he might never have exposed himself to its hazards and reality. Further, Richardson could have recited the "law and order" sections of the bible's Hebraic traditions and simply forced his own Christianized Western culture upon the Sawi. But by proceeding through love and fellowship he exposed himself to the very evil lying resident among the tribes of Papua needing redemption. If he had not done this, the gospel wouldn't have been anything more than window-dressing added to craven human behavior and customs.

Context? Context is everything. Isn't it?

R.E. Slater
June 8, 2020

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Never The Same:

Celebrating 50 Years Since Peace Child

Pioneers USA

Dec 12, 2012

The Sawi were headhunters and cannibals when a young couple named Don and Carol Richardson arrived in their village carrying their seven-month-old boy Steve—and a message that would change the tribe forever. The year was 1962, and Steve—and later, three more children—spent their youth among the Sawi, learning the language and embracing the culture in ways that would shape the rest of their lives. Their story was immortalized in the best-selling book Peace Child and a feature film of the same name, inspiring a new generation to take the gospel to the remaining isolated tribes of the earth.

Fifty years later, Steve joins his father, Don, and two brothers, Shannon and Paul, to visit the Sawi village where they grew up. What is the state of the church they planted among the Sawi? Are the friends they played with still alive? Will anyone remember the mark their family left on the tribe? Journey with Steve as he travels to the swamps of Papua, Indonesia, to introduce you to the Sawi, and explore the impact of the gospel among a previously unreached people group.

• For more information on Pioneers, visit http://pioneers.org. 

• Check out "Never the Same" on Facebook at http://facebook.com/neverthesamemovie

• To order "Never the Same" on DVD or Blu-ray Disc, visit http://pioneers.org/store.

Music Credits

• "A Beautiful Tale" and "Revival" by Ryan Taubert © 2012 SHOUT! Music Publishing Courtesy of SHOUT! Music Australia

• "O My Soul", "The Introductions" and "Moving Frames" by Adam Taylor, used with permission

• "The Father's Heart" by Tony Anderson, used with permission

• "The Ladder" by Drake Margolnick, used with permission

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Never The Same: Celebrating 50 Years Since Peace Child

Missionary Visits Cannibal Tribe 50 Years Later

Moira Brown speaks to Don Richardson about his life's

work as a missionary and the impact it has had worldwide.

Don Richardson-Author / Conference Speaker

www.DonRichardsonBooksales.com  

Books: "Peace Child" & "Eternity In their Hearts"

To Get Your Copy:

http://www.crossroads.ca/estore

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Amazon Link

DVD Link

In 1962, Don and Carol Richardson risked their lives to share the gospel with the Sawi people of New Guinea. Peace Child tells their unforgettable story of living among these headhunters and cannibals who valued treachery through "fattening" victims with friendship before the slaughter. God gave Don and Carol the key to the Sawi hearts via a redemptive analogy from their own mythology. The [Sawi's] "peace child" became the secret to unlocking a value system that existed through generations over centuries, possibly millenniums, of time. This analogy became a stepping-stone by which the gospel came into the Sawi culture and started both a spiritual and a social revolution from within. With an epilogue updating how the gospel has impacted the Sawi people, Peace Child will inspire a new generation of readers who need to hear this unforgettable story and the lessons it teaches us about communicating Christ in a meaningful way to those around us.

Christian Symbols Used As Weapons of Culture War

Donald Trump holds a Bible outside St John’s Church across Lafayette Park from the White House , 06.06.2020

How ironic. The Christian Church which is to bear the love of God to all the world through God's Divine Son, Jesus, has pulled out its Sword of Religious Justice in defense of its God and the Bible it believes in.

Unless I have missed something here God can quite adequately defend Himself when He needs too (which is NONE of the time). And God doesn't need our hands and feet to add to the pain of the world by inciting yet another Christian-based Inquistion or Faith-based Crusade which has afflicted and alientated the Church from much of the world over the centuries.

Then there are some Christians look at weather events, illness, financial difficulty, addictions, even pandemics and social anathemas as sent from God. Which again, is their view of the bible and the world. It certainly isn't mine, nor have I encouraged anything but the response of loving caretake to all around us. Not swords, not power politics, not cultural wars.

It comes down to the fact of how one reads the Bible. Is it a sacrosanct book so holy that every word is true and unquestionable? If so, than it leaves the Bible's interpretation up to the reader of its pages, as well as to that reader's background and life experiences who deigns to interpret it in his or her's good conscience. This I think alone is grounds enough to question common or popular interpretations of the Bible assuming every word is literally true and to be honored.

First, having met many a Christian and "false Christians-in-sheeps-clothing," over the length of my lifetime, I highly doubt that I would trust my understanding of the Bible to common or popular interpretation knowing it comes with a truckload of assumptions, homilies, folklores, and doubtful interpretations, superstitions, mysticisms, and such like. This includes for me especially those trained "Bible" scholars and Elecutioners behind the Sunday pulpit. I would first want to know the pattern of their life and the direction their "convictions" have taken them.

Secondly, I would want to know if their gospel errors on the side of God's love and humanity's wellbeing or if all the world is condemned to hell in their eyes and must either be converted and condemned to death to die. This latter instance should instill a lot of discernment when seeing such faith perceptions driving its adherents towards ideas of worldly judgment; who are self-appointing themselves and their fellowships to do the work of God's "justice" as they declare juris prudence to mean to them (sic, see the Hand Maid's Tale, as impudent man-made forms of ill-justice).

And after listening to Trump's impeachment lawyers and impolitic politicians defending the "truth" of the President, I am even in more conviction that God's "faithful" are declaring "good evil and evil good" so as to take on the power of the world and force God's Kindgom into the here-and-now.

So my question is, at what point has God directed your Christian faith to take on His job as Revelation declares? However, if this type of Christianity is part of the world's evil hastening the Lord's Coming then woe to those snakes and vipers among us who bring sin and evil by the unjust hands of man yet again to the ill of God's children of the world whom He reaches out to in kindness, respect, guidance, and fulfillment. Your faith has only added to the turmoil of the world you declare you know how to rule.

So pardon by lack of confidence in Christian barristers, preachers, and even "Bible" scholars locked into a faith tradition or worldly outlook which I don't find particularly helpful or attractive or even true. It is much more worthy of hell than it is of heaven's goodness and love.

Which gets me back to my first thoughts. How is a Christian Jihad any different from an Islamic Jihad? For myself, I don't think there is hardly any difference at all. Each self-appointed group believes in their own false ideas of God and the Bible / Koran in which they are willing to carry out unspeakable acts of cruelity, oppression, terror, and harm upon the general populace disbelieving their gospel of hate and division. And well they should!

Secondly, "Who appointed you God?" I highly doubt God did. Nor have I and many other Christians appointed you as our electors of unconstitutional defamation and acts against the American Bill of Rights for all of all colors, genders, sex, race, creed, ethnic, and religion.

Translated: "White Christian Nationalism" is not of God. Nor is silence and hard-heartedness a divine good when tolerating, or contributing to, racism and discrimination in all its forms, oppressions, and harms by silence, inaction, or even tone-deaf Fox-speak of media magnates fomenting illwill and hate.

Lastly, how the Religious Right interprets "Secularism" is yet another large obstacle not realizing that they have baptised themselves head-to-toe in secularism's language and demeanor. Too often I feel the world sees much more clearly than my Christian brothers and sisters who are looking through some kind of ruined mirror askew at everything that is good and beautiful in the world. And yes, the church isn't the sanctioner of "good and beautiful", God is through the megaphone of the world's actions, caretake for one another, and restoration of civil order, humanitarianism, and the environment.

The last council I ever wish to consider is a Christian Church or Movement or Faith group telling humanity what it thinks of everything when many, if not most, of these fellowships are no better or no worse than the rest of the world with its insights. The Christians of this world would do better to error on the side of love and humane action than to grab a sword and wave it at everybody as they do the Bible declaring "Thus saith the Lord" when in truth is its "Thus saith I". To me these are actions and words of abomination unworthy to be heard bearing not the Spirit of the Lord but the pit of Hell itself.

The best thing many Christians could do is to shut their mouths if they cannot speak and act out God's love. To learn to learn from God, fellow Christian humanists, and the world itself the wisdom it must acquire if wishing to minister well to people.

Your Christian culture wars are an abomination. Your leadership of false prophets and teachers speak shame upon the name of Jesus. And your politicians have shown themselves to be unjust, unmerciful, ruined in conviction and integrity, and generally an abysmal lot of sour humanity.

The Lord of the Earth and Mankind looks not kindly on those Christian Churches taking up the world into its own hands. God will rectify the world as He will, not us. The Church's contribution to the world's pain is absurd and nonsense. Holding up Bibles declaring the "justice of God" only succeeded in bringing up mockery to the precious faith of Jesus as the world jeers at the Church's hypocrisy. How is it the world knows God's love better than you do? Really, How?!

If the love of God is not in you, says the Apostle Paul, then ye are not of God, nor of His gospel. Look first to yourselves to repent of your wicked gospel, your ruined systems of ill-theology, and mythical beliefs of whose right and whose wrong. The last time I looked the Church is struggling no more than all the rest of us "secular" beings trying to figure things out.

I write these harsh words in peace and love to my brethren that they might repent and learn wisdom. Bless O' Lord these words.

Amen.

R.E. Slater

June 5, 2020

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Photo-Op in front of a Social Justice Reformer of the Catholic Church (06.01.2020)

Trump holding up Bible in front of St. John's Church sign saying "All Are Welcome" (06.01.2020)

Trump's photo op with church and Bible

was offensive, but not new.

https://theconversation.com/trumps-photo-op-with-church-and-bible-was-offensive-but-not-new-140053

by Beth Daley, Editor and General Manager

June 4, 2020

US President Donald Trump delivered an address this week in which he threatened military action on the nation. Then he walked to the nearby St John’s Episcopal Church to pose with a Bible.

Yes, Trump held the Bible like a baby holding a spoon for the first time – unsure which end is which – but the real problem was the complete disconnection between the text in his hand and the force, both verbally threatened and actually used, to clear the way for his stunt. Tear gas and militarised police cleared crowds, including some of the church’s own clergy from its grounds, in order for Trump to pose in front of the church.

While Christian outrage at Trump’s hypocrisy is genuine, for reasons that several Christian leaders have elegantly articulated, we need to ask ourselves: did Trump do anything new? Has he done anything that powerful “Christian” leaders haven’t done for centuries?

The answer is no.

Co-opting Christianity in the service of power is almost as old as Christianity itself. In the culture war raging in America, the very president who has stoked the flames of racism and white supremacy effectively claimed God is on his side. It is deeply offensive, but it is not new.

In the early fourth century CE, Flavius Valerius Constantine would defeat his brother-in-law, Maxentius, in a battle for control of the Roman Empire. His victory would solidify him as emperor of a vast western empire.

The legend goes that Constantine had a vision before the battle on Milvian Bridge: he saw a cross of light in the sky and heard a voice that said, “in this sign, conquer”. The next morning, Constantine ordered his soldiers to paint crosses on their shields. They marched into battle as the first cross-bearing “Christian” soldiers. When Constantine won, he would attribute his victory to the God of the Christians.

While historians are quick to point out that this “conversion” of Constantine is as much myth as reality, and may have been motivated by either political expediency or sheer superstition, it marked a turning point for Christianity. The new emperor’s adoption of the cross transformed a persecuted, minority sect into a legitimate religion and, eventually, the official state religion.

The use of propaganda and standardised imagery was not new for the Roman Empire. Indeed, they were already experts in using imagery to communicate dominance, power and a certain worldview. The new element in 312 CE was the type of imagery; Christian instead of pagan, a cross representing the death and resurrection of Jesus instead of a god, goddess or symbol from the Roman Pantheon.

We have been left with a legacy in Western Christianity of powerful rulers claiming God for their cause. The Crusaders rode out to fight Muslims with chests and shields adorned with the sign of the cross, popes would wield more power than kings, and God’s name would be invoked in war after war.

Eventually, Christianity became so synonymous with colonial power and whiteness that the two can be hard to distinguish. It is telling that, in the new Western empire, no American president has been elected without explicitly signalling his Christian faith.

Photoshopped images of Hitler with a Bible started to circulate this week following Trump’s stunt. Evidence already exists for the casual way in which Hitler, too, co-opted Christianity for his cause. A 1930s propaganda book titled Hitler as No One Knows Him contains numerous photographs of Hitler designed to make him likeable. One of them has him leaving a church, implying his Christian faith and basic decency, suggesting he is a good Christian just like so many of those who were deceived by his politics and drafted to his cause.

Closer to home, the Bible arrived on the shores of Australia in the hands of those who would colonise this land through violence and domination. Its diverse history here has been described by Meredith Lake. But the Bible was, at least superficially, synonymous with white culture and power. It would be (mis)used to justify colonisation in Australia just as it was to argue for apartheid in South Africa.

The co-option of Christian symbols by Western Christian empires has meant its core symbols have often been inverted in meaning. The great irony is that the cross worn as a symbol of power and victory by imperial soldiers was first the symbol of the unjust death of Jesus, a brown-skinned Jew killed by the Roman State. It was a shameful symbol in that culture, an image for a humiliating public death.

The Bible, wielded by Trump and others like him, likewise did not begin its life as the text of the victor. Had Trump read the text he held, he would have found a story of liberation for slaves, a divine preference for the poor, a demand of justice for the marginalised, a cry of lament from those who grieve, and a damning critique of any empire that oppressed its people.

What Trump did was not new. But perhaps we are offended because his delivery was so unsophisticated, an insult to our intelligence for its lack of pretence at genuine faith. He didn’t even attempt to enter the church and pray nor open the Bible and read it.

Both church and Bible were mere backdrops, doing the rhetorical work Trump needed in signalling his virtue and values to his base. Values, to be clear, that are antithetical to both the building and the book in his hand.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Observations

by R.E. Slater

• Context is everything. If you know the context you will then know the deep blasphemy which President Trump committed in front of St. John's Church and a Catholic Church later that same day.

• Was President Trump's photo-op an act of desecration? Has similar acts occurred in history using a symbol of goodness and healing as a symbol bearing illicit in evil?

• Leaning into the gospel of Christ requires leaning into your community with God's love and His message to love. Anything less - any gospel less - is not of God but of man.

• We hold up Jesus, not a book. Into a book we can write any story; in Jesus the story we write is one of love. This is the action and spirit we hold up which welcomes all as the church sign said contra a religious Trumpland of unwelcome and unwillingness to engage in embracing our brothers and sisters of color. 

• Ironically, a white gospel is held up in front of a truly Christian church preaching social justice reform through the actives of love as exampled by Jesus in the Gospels.

• The Bible declares we love one another. To those false leaders of hate and division we reject their teachings, their descrating lies, and their leadership. They are of the devil and not of God for ye will know God's disciples by God's love.

• Desecration of the Word of God on the steps of a church which actively practices social justice. Behind the president stands a sign saying, "All are welcomed." Clearly the optics do not measure up to the "White" House's active apartheid policies against people of color. If it was, the president would've bent down on one knee seeking repentance in confessional prayer for the loss of black lives under police arrests. Blasphemy is holding a bible of the God of love who is unknown, unread, and unpracticed, claiming that Christ is the center of one's life when in words and deeds there is no such truth.

• Leaning into the gospel of Christ requires leaning into your community with God's love and His message to love. Anything less, any gospel less, is not of God but of man.

• Healing: Speaking to Black and White communities alike. Without love for one another we cannot enter a Promised Land overflowing with honey and light. With silence and inaction a people remain divided forever.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The People's House has been lost to Religious Jihadists

Related News Articles

What does the Symbolism of Holding a Bible Aloft Mean?

• Autocrats Love Using the Bible as a Prop. Americans Shouldn’t.
• https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/02/autocrats-idolatry-trump-protests-george-floyd-america/

• Donald Trump, a Bible, and blasphemy
• https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/donald-trump-a-bible-and-blasphemy/

• Trump Defends 'Law And Order' Symbolism Of Photo-Op At St. John's Church
• https://www.npr.org/2020/06/03/868779265/trump-defends-symbolism-of-photo-op-at-st-johns-church

• He wears the armor of God': evangelicals hail Trump's church photo op
• https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/03/donald-trump-church-photo-op-evangelicals

• What Does the Bible Mean to Trump?
• https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/us/politics/trump-bible-st-johns.html

• “An Abuse of Sacred Symbols”: Trump, a Bible, and a Sanctuary
• https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/an-abuse-of-sacred-symbols-trump-a-bible-and-a-sanctuary

• Jimmy Carter on George Floyd protests: 'Silence can be as deadly as violence'
• https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/03/politics/jimmy-carter-george-floyd/index.html

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Dr. Richard Rose

A Beloved Civilization:

[Martin Luther] King’s Dream and Covid-19

https://www.openhorizons.org/a-beloved-civilization-kingrsquos-dream-and-covid-19.html

by Rev. Dr. Richard Rose

After witnessing the blasphemy of an infant president holding up a Bible in front of a church as if it were a semi-automatic rifle, pulling his lackeys into the mix for a photo op aimed at sustaining a more hateful America, I needed to turn to a scholar who actually reads the book on a daily basis and for whom the Bible is meaningful as a guide for living. Someone who is African-American and works closely with the black church. Someone who is steeped in the vision of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and sensitive to the needs of people of all faiths (and no faith) to work together in bringing about a paradigm shift: a shift from inequality and hatred into a beloved community that is good for people and for the earth, with no one left behind. I turned to Dr. Richard Rose of La Verne University, author of An Interreligious Approach to a Social Ethic for Christian Audiences (2017) and 7 Meditations on the Lord’s Prayer (2016). It helped.

- Jay McDaniel, Process Scholar and Bible Teacher

  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

  

  

  


Protesters brutally dispersed ahead of Trump's
photo opportunity with a Bible, June 1, 2020

Jimmy Kimmel on Protests, Trump’s Bible Photo Op

& White Privilege June 2, 2020

'He wears the armor of God':

Evangelicals hail Trump's church photo op

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/03/donald-trump-church-photo-op-evangelicals

by Matthew Teague

June 3, 2020

The president’s appeal to his base amid protests was derided

by some Christians. Others saw a victory in a world of evil.

No one accuses Donald Trump of subtlety. When the US president raised a Bible overhead on Monday evening outside St John’s Episcopal church in Washington DC, the sign was unmistakable: an appeal to his white evangelical base for loyalty, as protests and riots roared across America.

Not every Christian answered the call. The Rev Gini Gerbasi, an Episcopal priest, said police used teargas to drive her and others from St John’s before Trump’s appearance. “They turned holy ground into a battleground,” she told Religion News Service.

But many of Trump’s evangelical supporters, far from Washingtons political stage, saw the move as a victory in a world rife with evil.

“My whole family was flabbergasted,” said Benjamin Horbowy, 37.

The Horbowys had gathered in Tallahassee, Florida, to watch live as Trump walked from the White House to St John’s. “My mother just shouted out, ‘God give him strength! He’s doing a Jericho walk!’”

A Jericho walk, in some evangelical circles, refers to the biblical book of Joshua, where God commanded the Israelites to walk seven times around the opposing city of Jericho, whose walls then came crashing down.

Horbowy already supported Trump politically – he heads the local chapter of a pro- Trump motorcycle club and is campaigning for a seat in Florida’s state senate – but when Trump lifted the Bible, Horbowy and his family felt overcome spiritually.

“My mother started crying. She comes from Pentecostal background, and she started speaking in tongues. I haven’t heard her speak in tongues in years,” he said. “I thought, look at my president! He’s establishing the Lord’s kingdom in the world.”

Did he feel that conflicted with the Gospel of John, where Jesus said “my kingdom is not of this world”?

“Well,” Horbowy said, “that’s a philosophical question.”

After watching Trump’s gesture, Horbowy changed his Facebook profile photo to one of Trump outside St John’s, with added rays of light emanating from the Bible. “It was the coolest thing he could do. What more could he do, wear blue jeans and ride in on a horse?” he said.

The catalyst for the protests was the killing of 46-year-old George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Asked about that, Horbowy said, “There’s a Bible verse that says we shouldn’t talk about evil things. We can just say, ‘There’s evil’ and move on.”

He couldn’t remember the exact verse, he said.

So how did devotees like Horbowy become such a potent force that Trump would signal them in his hour of need? One answer lies in their relationship with Trump. They have given him their fervent support at the ballot box and in turn they have seen a conservative takeover of the courts and an assault on reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights.

Their power and worldview is a culmination of trends that started decades ago, according to John Fea, a history professor at Messiah College and himself an evangelical Christian. “It’s rooted in fear,” he said.

In the 1980s, Fea said, several forces converged to alarm white Christians: a removal of official prayer and Bible readings from schools, an influx of immigrants from Asia and the Middle East, and the final desegregation of schools like Bob Jones University.

“So came the emergence of the Christian right,” Fea said.

Figures like Jerry Falwell and James Dobson started wielding political influence in a new way, followed today by a new generation that includes Franklin Graham and the Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress, one of Trump’s leading evangelical defenders.

“What seems to be missing in much of the coverage is that a group of protesters had tried to burn that church to the ground 24 hours earlier,” Jeffress said. 

Jeffress sees no conflict between Trump’s behavior and the Bible he held up on Monday evening. “You mean, does he pretend to be perfectly pious?” he said. “No.”

Fea calls faith leaders like Jeffress “court evangelicals”.

“Trump has these people around him,” Fea said. “They’re telling him, ‘You need to get your evangelical base on board.

People once concerned with piety, Fea said, now crave “an exercise in pure political power”, and the Bible is no longer a spiritual weapon but an earthly one.

When Trump describes himself as a “law and order” president and holds aloft a Bible, he conflates which law he will enforce, and whose order will follow. In a short speech before the walk to St John’s, Trump said he would “dominate the streets”. That is the “kingdom in the world” Horbowy referenced.

“I believe it’s like Ephesians 6:10 through 19,” Horbowy said from Florida. “I believe this is a president who wears the full armor of God.”

But one of those verses – verse 12 – says explicitly that “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood”, but against spiritual enemies.

“Well,” Horbowy said. “He’s fearless.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

President Trump appealing to the Christian Right

The Christians Who Loved Trump’s Stunt

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/trumps-biblical-spectacle-outside-st-johns-church/612529/

by McKay Coppins

June 2, 2020

He wielded the Bible like a foreign object, awkwardly adjusting his grip as though trying to get comfortable. He examined its cover. He held it up over his right shoulder like a crossing guard presenting a stop sign. He did not open it.

“Is that your Bible?” a reporter asked.

“It’s a Bible,” the president replied.

Even by the standards of Donald Trump’s religious photo ops, the dissonance was striking. Moments earlier, he had stood in the Rose Garden and threatened to unleash the military on unruly protesters. He used terms such as anarchy and domestic terror, and vowed to “dominate the streets.” To clear the way for his planned post-speech trip to St. John’s Church, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators.

A few hours after the dystopian spectacle, I spoke on the phone with Robert Jeffress, a Dallas megachurch pastor and indefatigable Trump ally. He sounded almost gleeful.

“I thought it was completely appropriate for the president to stand in front of that church,” Jeffress told me. “And by holding up the Bible, he was showing us that it teaches that, yes, God hates racism, it’s despicable—but God also hates lawlessness.”

“So,” he added, “I’m happy.”

In many ways, the president’s stunt last night—with its mix of shallow credal signaling and brutish force—was emblematic of his appeal to the religious right. As I’ve written before, most white conservative Christians don’t want piety from this president; they want power. In Trump, they see a champion who will restore them to their rightful place at the center of American life, while using his terrible swift sword to punish their enemies.

This dynamic was on vivid display throughout the night. Even as cities across the country once again spiraled into chaos, prominent conservative evangelicals cheered Trump’s performance on Twitter.

“I don’t know about you but I’ll take a president with a Bible in his hand in front of a church over far left violent radicals setting a church on fire any day of the week,” wrote David Brody, a news anchor at the Christian Broadcasting Network. (Trump selected St. John’s, which has hosted presidents since James Madison for worship services, because protesters had set a fire in its nursery the night before.)

“I will never forget seeing [Trump] slowly & in-total-command walk … across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church defying those who aim to derail our national healing by spreading fear, hate & anarchy,” wrote Johnnie Moore, the president of the Congress of Christian Leaders.

In an email to me, Ralph Reed, the chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, heaped praise on Trump for his visit: “His presence sent the twin message that our streets and cities do not belong to rioters and domestic terrorists, and that the ultimate answer to what ails our country can be found in the repentance, redemption, and forgiveness of the Christian faith.”

Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist at Clemson University, has argued that Trump’s religious base can best be understood through the lens of Christian nationalism. In his research, Whitehead has found that white Protestants who believe most strongly that Christianity should hold a privileged place in America’s public square are more likely than others to agree with statements such as “We must crack down on troublemakers to save our moral standards and keep law and order” and “Police officers shoot blacks more often because they are more violent than whites.”

Whitehead told me in an interview that Christian nationalism is often not really about theology (and thus can’t be ascribed to all conservative churchgoers): “It’s about identity, enforcing hierarchy, and order.”

That Trump’s religious posturing has little to do with religion has long been a matter of conventional wisdom (see: Corinthians, Two); fewer have grasped the extent to which that’s true of Trump’s “religious” base as well.

After the president’s unannounced visit to St. John’s, Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., gave an outraged interview to The Washington Post. “Everything he has said and done is to inflame violence … We need moral leadership, and he’s done everything to divide us, and has just used one of the most sacred symbols of the Judeo-Christian tradition,” she said.

But, of course, sacredness has never been a concern of Trump’s. He didn’t open the Bible he was brandishing for the cameras, because he had no use for its text. He didn’t go inside the church he was using as a backdrop, because he had no interest in a sermon.

To Trump, the Bible and the church are not symbols of faith; they are weapons of culture war. And to many of his Christian supporters watching at home, the pandering wasn’t an act of inauthenticity; it was a sign of allegiance—and shared dominance.

*MCKAY COPPINS is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Wilderness, a book about the battle over the future of the Republican Party.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Rector Gerbasi inside St. John’s Church

Powerful Eyewitness Testimony from Rector Gina Gerbasi who was at St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Park today, about the President’s unannounced ‘visit’ to the church:

“Friends, I am ok, but I am, frankly shaken. I was at St. John's, Lafayette Square most of the afternoon, with fellow clergy and laypeople - and clergy from some other denominations too. 

We were passing out water and snacks, and helping the patio area at St. John's, Lafayette square to be a place of respite and peace. All was well - with a few little tense moments - until about 6:15 or so. By then, I had connected with the Black Lives Matter medic team, which was headed by an EMT. Those people were AMAZING. They had been on the patio all day, and thankfully had not had to use much of the eyewash they had made. 

Around 6:15 or 6:30, the police started really pushing protestors off of H Street (the street between the church and Lafayette Park, and ultimately, the White House. They started using tear gas and folks were running at us for eyewashes or water or wet paper towels. At this point, Julia, one of our seminarians for next year (who is a trauma nurse) and I looked at each other in disbelief. I was coughing, her eyes were watering, and we were trying to help people as the police - in full riot gear - drove people toward us. Julia and her classmates left and I stayed with the BLM folks trying to help people. Suddenly, around 6:30, there was more tear gas, more concussion grenades, and I think I saw someone hit by a rubber bullet - he was grasping his stomach and there was a mark on his shirt. 

The police in their riot gear were literally walking onto the St. John's, Lafayette Square patio with these metal shields, pushing people off the patio and driving them back. People were running at us as the police advanced toward us from the other side of the patio. 

We had to try to pick up what we could. The BLM medic folks were obviously well practiced. They picked up boxes and ran. I was so stunned I only got a few water bottles and my spray bottle of eyewash. 

We were literally DRIVEN OFF of the St. John's, Lafayette Square patio with tear gas and concussion grenades and police in full riot gear. We were pushed back 20 feet, and then eventually - with SO MANY concussion grenades - back to K street. By the time I got back to my car, around 7, I was getting texts from people saying that Trump was outside of St. John's, Lafayette Square. 

I literally COULD NOT believe it. WE WERE DRIVEN OFF OF THE PATIO AT ST. JOHN'S - a place of peace and respite and medical care throughout the day - SO THAT MAN COULD HAVE A PHOTO OPPORTUNITY IN FRONT OF THE CHURCH!!! PEOPLE WERE HURT SO THAT HE COULD POSE IN FRONT OF THE CHURCH WITH A BIBLE! HE WOULD HAVE HAD TO STEP OVER THE MEDICAL SUPPLIES WE LEFT BEHIND BECAUSE WE WERE BEING TEAR GASSED!!!! 

I am deeply shaken. I did not see any protestors throw anything until the tear gas and concussion grenades started, and then it was mostly water bottles. I am shaken, not so much by the taste of tear gas and the bit of a cough I still have, but by the fact that that show of force was for a PHOTO OPPORTUNITY. 

The patio of St. John's, Lafayette square had been HOLY GROUND today. A place of respite and laughter and water and granola bars and fruit snacks. But that man turned it into a BATTLE GROUND first, and a cheap political stunt second. 

I am DEEPLY OFFENDED on behalf of every protestor, every Christian, the people of St. John's, Lafayette square, every decent person there, and the BLM medics who stayed with just a single box of supplies and a backpack, even when I got too scared and had to leave. I am ok. But I am now a force to be reckoned with.”

- Rector Gina Gerbasi

Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a Conscripted Cultural Icon

Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a
Conscripted Cultural Icon

by R.E. Slater

I started this morning praying about the conscription of words (noun, compulsory enlistment for state service, typically into the armed forces). Of the church placing ideas into the cauldron of public awareness which purport truth but in actuality lead away from it to some other land of apology (sic, "defensive ideation") meant to preserve and extend the church's unease with secularism.

But not the secularism it thinks it is preserving itself from, but a kind of secularism which it has chosen to bath in not thinking of the soaps and bath waters it is using as anything more than "biblical and God-honoring." Which in truth it is not. It is simply another form of secularism. How ironic.

Indeed the church has taken in the world exactly as it has preached against it for so many years by conscripting words and ideas that play into its form of biblicism and religiosity. As a result, the very kind of secularism that it has accused other Christians of living in has become its own adopted milieu as well.

In fact, it would be nearly impossible not to be culturalized into the society one lives in. All the more so for those claiming they are not when they are. In today's terms the church has bathed itself in the culturalization of "fear, uncertainty, and hate" which is now being played out in American democratic society under Trumpian Christianity as a form of heavy-handed politics against the very people who are Americans but not white Americans nor white Christian Americans.

Anti-thetic Americans (adjective; of the nature of, or involving, antithesis; directly opposed, contrasted, opposite) are of every color, race, culture, and religion except the white majority color, race, culture and religion. The deaths of Ahmed Aubrey and George Floyd have accentuated America's divide over its state of blendedness, acceptance, and embrace.

   

Unfortuanately, the very church which should be standing in front of the societal lines of support and demonstration is off to the side saying nothing, doing nothing, and speaking against the wrongful deaths of black Americans espousing "law and order" over basic human and first amendment rights of speaking out against social injustice. The church's voice is silent. Gravely silent, bereft of support or involvement.

But not all the church. Church's declared liberal or progressive (more negative labels!) are on the front lives protesting, serving, aiding, and ministering to those hurting and demonstrating against the divide of fear, anarchy, and hatred espoused by the government-backing silent churches of America.

The problem with labels

The problem with labels is that they do exactly what we wish them to do. They can defend (or, apologise, in Christian lingo) our position; serve as capstones which exclude others from conversation so they go unheard; and camp down in racist forms and expressions using conscripted, or unscrupulous, positions declaring "this thing is secular and this thing is not." Which, of course, only heightens the secularity of that position.

The church of the living Christ's only Christian "laws" are to love God and love one another. When this is not done then a nation, as well as its societies, come under the harsher laws of "what ye have sown ye shall also reap." If fear, anarchy, and hate are chosen as the paths to travel then it comes out in unusual but expected ways. Ways that are not socially just, that are publically oppressive, and which overtaxes its greater populations of difference in abusive political and social policies leaning towards white justification.

As such, secularization has occurred within the church by its unwary approval and silent testimony of vouchsafing white nationalism or Christian nationalism (you choose the expression) over the testimony of the Lord's directive to love one another.

Eric Metaxas

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Eric Metaxas

In this regard, Christianity will chose its representatives it will listen to. Who it thinks best defends its faith and speak its words to the world around it. One such name is Eric Metaxas known for his conscription of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's testimony to love one's enemies while also resisting their evil. Having done that, Dietrich died an ugly death of torture and cruel hanging by piano wire for his testimony to share Christ's love for humanity by opposing Nazism in its many ugly forms of justified Christian secularity.

Metaxas took a stellar witness to the "costly discipleship of grace" exampled by Bonhoeffer by declaring Christian jihad on liberal and progressive Christians. He conscripted Bonhoeffer's education, training, testimony, ministries, and voice by chasting those Christians and churches he considered anathema to the Word of God. He rapidly became the conservative and right-wing church's hero.

He did this by portraying Bonhoeffer as the "traditionalized" Christian who opposed "liberalism" in religious affairs. Metaxas turned Bonhoeffer into a culture warrior for Christians determined to resist the encroachment of what he thought "secular liberalism" was according to popular church ideology.

The result? Black Lives didn't Matter; Trumpian churches integrated empire politics into its own sectarian, if not cultic, doctrines of Christian faith; it conscripted its ideas of the Kingdom of God into political policies; and allowed with blind eye and deaf ears racism and injustices to continue apace, if not enhanced, by approved government policies creating what amounted to modern day concentration camps for unwanted Hispanic border people separating children from their families and parents from their loved ones. All in the name of Christ.

A Tree and Its Fruit (Context Matthew 7)

15 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. 16 You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? 17 So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. 18 A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.

I Never Knew You

21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

Eric Metaxas might be compared with DaVinci Code author Dan Brown; both are exciting writers to read, they tell a great story, and their books are hard to put down. But like Dan Brown, Eric Metaxas has taken history, twisted it into a new tale that isn't as true as the reader thinks, and when done, you've come away satisfied but further away from the truth then when you first began. - re slater

The Problem with Defending One's Faith

It was quickly seen by Bonhoeffer scholars that Eric Metaxas had made Dietrich's image into an image wholly unlike who he was and what he stood for. Claiming "the liberals" had misinterpreted Bonhoeffer, Metaxas had made Bonhoeffer into his own image. Metaxas was the very one who had misinterpreted Bonhoeffer forcing his German Lutheran legacy into the polarizing fictions of the American church's idea of itself and its gospel.

Claiming Bonhoeffer was not a Marxist, a pacifist, nor post-Christian humanist who was hijacked by the hard left, by agnostics and atheists, Metaxas encouraged conservative Christians to consider Bonhoeffer in the recreation of their own image. He incorrectly identified the "death of God" theologians to the secular left and conflated mainstream Bonhoeffer scholars as liberal and atheistic. In essence, the dominant form of conservative Christianity's cultural ethos forced his interpretation of Bonhoeffer's legacy into its own conscripted uses of that legacy.

By exaggeration and distortion, Metaxas had created an identity of Bonhoeffer that the American conservative church approved off; which best correlated with how it saw itself both in mission and resolution. It was simplistic, misinformed and polarizing but it was the kind of formulation which the conservative church could adopt and roll with. In essence, not only Metaxas, but the church itself, was driven both by theological and political agenda. With the help of other dissident voices, Metaxas  in 2010 unwittingly had laid the foundations for a cultural Christian Civil War with contemporary democratic American society. In determined idealistic reforms it sought to secede (verb, withdraw formally from membership of a federal union, an alliance, or a political or religious organization) from its inherited American cultural identity which ironically it had but only appropriated upon itself without realising it in select, chosen forms.

When done, the church could now justify its position as excluding American culture and any duty it might have to the society it lives within. More aggressively, it could now begin implementing its own cultural ethos of Kingdom Ethics and Culture - more commonly known as Christian Dominionism or Christian Reconstruction:

"Dominion theology (also known as dominionism) is a group of Christian political ideologies that seek to institute a nation governed by Christians based on their understandings of biblical law. Extents of rule and ways of achieving governing authority are varied. For example, dominion theology can include theonomy, but does not necessarily involve advocating Mosaic law as the basis of government. The label is applied primarily toward groups of Christians in the United States.

"Prominent adherents of these ideologies are otherwise theologically diverse, including Calvinist Christian reconstructionism, Roman Catholic Integralism, Charismatic-Pentecostal Kingdom Now theology, New Apostolic Reformation, and others. Most of the contemporary movements labeled dominion theology arose in the 1970s from religious movements asserting aspects of Christian nationalism.

"Some have applied the term dominionist more broadly to the whole Christian right. This usage is controversial. There are concerns from members of these communities that this is a label being used to marginalize Christians from public discourse.

"An example of dominionism in reformed theology is Christian reconstructionism, which originated with the teachings of R. J. Rushdoony in the 1960s and 1970s. Rushdoony's theology focuses on theonomy (the rule of the Law of God), a belief that all of society should be ordered according to the laws that governed the Israelites in the Old Testament. His system is strongly Calvinistic, emphasizing the sovereignty of God over human freedom and action, and denying the operation of charismatic gifts in the present day (cessationism); both of these aspects are in direct opposition to Kingdom Now Theology."

Summary

And so we have an ideal example of one's theology adapting to what one prefers to believe and live out. Rather than using outside sources (the dreaded liberal or progressive sources of academia) to assist in critiquing its theological ideations, conservative and right-wing Christians have insulated themselves from critique while at the same time justifying their unbiblical positions of theonomy (authoritarian law and order) over the American democratic culture of working together towards a just and preferred outcome of fairness and equality. Even if it takes denying, removing, revising the US Constitution in achieving its ends.

The ideals of God when harshly implemented are a misplaced means to a bad end. God is love, not judge, not purger of societal culture in the name of Christ. He does not implement Christian inquistions, crusades, or injustices. It is through standing up for societal reform in loving and persuading ways of rightness and respect, listening and togetherness, that the church's testimony to the God it espouses is the more powerful voice for socially just freedom and liberty.

2 Corinthians 12:9-10 English Standard Version (ESV)

9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 10 For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

The church's mission is not to forcibly overtake a societal culture through post-colonial like Christianiation of a culture but to adapt its strengths and outlooks by declaring a God uninterested in Westernizing a culture with or proselytizing it with ancient Hebraic laws.  But to declare a God who will partner and guide a culture towards Christ's relevant examples of love and ministry within that culture itself and thereby adapt Christianity into a culture through its own modes and means, words and symbolisms (sic, Peace Child by Dan Ketchum). There is a big difference here. One is jack-booted in its approach and the other is weak and humble in approach and message.

This latter experience of Christianity is therefore careful not to colonize its assumed cultural identity by presumptuously believing its secularized form of Christianity is the more "godly" or "holy" form of culture expression and implementation. In fact, every culture can teach us something strong and good and beautiful if we learn to listen to it arightly with respect and openness. To a gospel-centered church interested in sharing Christ's atoning love it is this approach of assimilating Christ's message of loving caretake into a culture within which it might seek to minister by appropriation of that culture, exampling cultural respect, a listening ear, and learning heart. That is Christ's message to cultural assimilators. It is not cultural dominionism, reconstruction, nationalised supremacy, or post-colonialism.

So then, the church is not to dominate its cultural form of political persuasion or bible misrepresentation upon a foreign society alien to its dominionistic religious message. If so, it is creating the same kind of conscription that its own apologists such as Eric Metaxas have done by serving to the American church its own story of dominion theology as opposed to a loving theology full of grace, truth, and compassion.

R.E. Slater

June 4, 2020

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

How NOT To Colonise the Gospel of Christ

             

In 1962, Don and Carol Richardson risked their lives to share the gospel with the Sawi people of New Guinea. Peace Child tells their unforgettable story of living among these headhunters and cannibals who valued treachery through "fattening" victims with friendship before the slaughter. God gave Don and Carol the key to the Sawi hearts via a redemptive analogy from their own mythology. The [Sawi's] "peace child" became the secret to unlocking a value system that existed through generations over centuries, possibly millenniums, of time. This analogy became a stepping-stone by which the gospel came into the Sawi culture and started both a spiritual and a social revolution from within. With an epilogue updating how the gospel has impacted the Sawi people, Peace Child will inspire a new generation of readers who need to hear this unforgettable story and the lessons it teaches us about communicating Christ in a meaningful way to those around us.

Never The Same: Celebrating 50 Years Since Peace Child

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Observation

by R.E. Slater

Let me clarify "Ethics & Empire in a Post-Truth Era" as concerning the conservative church; its apologists (otherwise known as "defensive elocutionists") for its culturally-based doctrines; and its missionary zeal for inculcating Christian theonomic forces. That is, dominionizing or re-placing secular American culture by its own form of secular religious "freedom and jurisprudence".

This has been done by infusing the Republican form of US government with conservative rightwing policies and behavior. It is what drives the Trumpian churches forward as we watch it play out after the days of President Obama's election; this alt-Christian culture's dislike of his policies; and willful interjection of why they think their own (white) conservative "Christian" policies are better than the ethnically diverse liberals, progressives, and "secular" culture they have pushed off to the side in favor of their own secular religious culture and ideologies.

Thus Bonhoeffer. Thus this post decrying Bonhoeffer's misuse. Thus the reference to the Peace Child as a more appropriate assimilation of the Gospel of Christ into a non-Christian culture. Thus the Barmen's Declaration of Confessing German Churches in the days of totalitarian Naziism decrying the secularization of Empire Ethics into the ethics of the Lutheran Church.

- re slater

The Barmen Declaration

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Hijacking Bonhoeffer

https://www.christiancentury.org/reviews/2010-09/hijacking-bonhoeffer

by Clifford Green

October 4, 2010

You have to read Eric Metaxas with bifocals. With the upper lens you read the Metaxas of the book, an engaging narrative by an experienced writer who presents Bonhoeffer as a Christian hero led by God to struggle against an evil regime and against his wayward church. With the lower lens you read the Metaxas revealed in numerous web interviews in which he gives his account of Bonhoeffer's "staggering" significance today.

Metaxas first read Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship at the time of his evangelical conversion some 20 years ago. Formerly a staff writer for Chuck Colson's BreakPoint, he appears frequently as a cultural commentator on Fox News and CNN. He founded and hosts Socrates in the City, a monthly event in New York featuring prominent speakers on "life, God, and other small topics." He presumably treats such topics in his trilogy of popular apologetics, the first being Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God (But Were Afraid to Ask). In 2007 he published Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, which made the New York Times best-seller list and was the companion book to the film Amazing Grace.

Readers coming to Bonhoeffer for the first time will likely be carried along by Metaxas's engaging narrative and admiration for his subject. A talented writer, he depends heavily on Eberhard Bethge's biography— 40 years old but still an unsurpassed source. His new material comes especially from the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English edition, which contains eight volumes of Bonhoeffer's letters, sermons and papers. Metaxas quotes copiously from the five volumes that have only recently been translated. Also built into the narrative are letters between Bonhoeffer and his fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer, published in 1994 as Love Letters from Cell 92. Other sources include various memoirs written by Bonhoeffer's [twin] sister Sabine and by acquaintances such as Paul Lehmann, Reinhold Niebuhr and George Bell. Martin Doblmeier, maker of the film Bonhoeffer, calls the book "a masterpiece that reads like a great novel" and its author "the preeminent biographer of Christianity's most courageous figures."

I will not linger over the numerous factual errors, including problems with the German words sprinkled throughout the text (even the notorious names Buchenwald and Dachau are misspelled). I will not fret about the problems infecting the copious endnotes, especially the missing, incomplete and garbled sources. I will not dwell on the fact that a critical assessment of sources is absent. (Metaxas repeats the pious and probably self-serving statement of the Flossenbürg camp doctor about Bonhoeffer's death and the canard about Bonhoeffer's radio speech on the Führer being cut off as if he were a marked man from the beginning of Hitler's rule, when in fact he just went over the time limit.) One of the signs that the book was rushed through the press to appear on the 65th anniversary of Bonhoeffer's death is found in the news that Bonhoeffer crossed the Atlantic in the "thirty-three-ton ship" Columbus.

Informed readers will attend to what else is missing. Contrary to claims in the publicity, there is no new research in this biography. Bonhoeffer scholars are thanked but only mentioned in their role as editors; their research and writings are never discussed. (Disclosure: I have edited several volumes in the Bonhoeffer Works.) Because research has found new documents and new interpretation has been written since Bethge's book, one can indeed make a case for a new biography. (Ferdinand Schlingensiepen has just undertaken this serious task in Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance.) And given the tendency of evangelicals and liberals to focus on different parts of Bonhoeffer's theology and witness, the challenge is to transcend theological polarization and present an integrated and compelling picture.

NYC Union Theological Seminary

But that is not Metaxas's approach: polarization is a structural motif of the whole narrative, because his mission is to reclaim the true Bonhoeffer from "liberals" who have "hijacked" the theologian. Consider the treatment of Bon­hoeffer's year at Union Theological Seminary in 1930-1931. It is true that Bonhoeffer was very critical of theology at Union as well as the preaching he heard in white churches like Riverside Church. What Metaxas highlights, however, is Bon­hoeffer's experience at Abyssinian Baptist Church, where, he implies, Bonhoeffer had a conversion experience and became a serious Christian. In volume 10 of the Bonhoeffer Works I present new evidence of Abyssinian's deep personal impact on Bonhoeffer. But that is to complement, not disparage, the decisive impact of Bonhoeffer's friends at Union Seminary.

At Union, as Bonhoeffer himself reports, he engaged in life-changing discussions with Lehmann, Jean Lasserre, Erwin Sutz and Frank Fisher, discussions about the Sermon on the Mount, peace and "learning to have faith." These led directly and quickly to work on his book Discipleship. There, too, he got to know several Social Gospel radicals—pacifists and socialists—about whom he continued to inquire in letters years later. Metaxas tells us nothing of all this. Why? Because his Union Seminary is a construct of his polarizing worldview in which evangelicals are pitted against liberals.

This same simplistic approach governs Metaxas's writing about German theology and about the church struggle under [German] National Socialism. He flippantly compares the theological controversy between Harnack and Barth to the conflict between latter-day Darwinians and proponents of Intelligent Design. He presents the Confessing Church as if it were an American denomination founded by Bonhoeffer. Indeed, he describes the battles of American fundamentalists and of the Confessing Church as essentially the same. Bonhoeffer, Metaxas tells us, "equated the fundamentalists with the Confessing Church. Here they were fighting against the corrupting influences of the theologians at Union and Riverside, and at home the fight was against the Reich church."

Two aspects of Bonhoeffer are so disturbing to Metaxas that he has to deny them outright or try to explain them away. Bonhoeffer, he insists, was not a pacifist. While pacifism as usually understood is not a good word to describe Bonhoeffer's position, his Christian peace ethic was rooted in the core doctrines of his theology—his Christology and his understanding of discipleship, his interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount and his doctrine of the church. He did not abandon his peace ethic while working to kill Hitler and end the Nazi regime. Just one sign of this stance is the fact that even during the war Bonhoeffer wrote in his Ethics and spoke to his fiancée in support of conscientious objection. These matters of theology and ethics are too subtle for Metaxas; consequently his treatment of the Lasserre-Bonhoeffer friendship in New York falsifies the sources and wallows in sentimentality.

Worse, if possible, is Metaxas's embarrassment about Bonhoeffer's writing in Letters and Papers from Prison about "religionless Christianity." In a Trinity Forum interview he even stated that Bonhoeffer "never really said it," but then had to retract that because, well, Bonhoeffer did say it. But, Metaxas continues, he wrote it privately in a letter to Bethge and never intended anyone to see it because it was "utterly out of keeping with the rest of Bonhoeffer's life." He calls Bonhoeffer's theological prison reflections a "few bone fragments . . . set upon by famished kites and less noble birds, many of whose descendants gnaw them still."

Descending to insult, even insulting the subject of his own book, is a sure sign that an author is in trouble. Why does he do this? Ostensibly because the death-of-God theologians, those "liberals," have "hijacked" Bonhoeffer. But why whip a few writers who made a brief splash 40 years ago and who have had little or no influence on theology or the church? Because they function as straw men in his polarizing narrative about "orthodox Christians" and "liberals." His real target is liberals, and not just theological liberals, but political liberals too.

The simplest way to refute Metaxas's dismissal of the prison theology is to note Bonhoeffer's answer when Bethge asked him how the book he was writing on religionless Christianity related to the unfinished Ethics. Bonhoeffer answered that the book he was writing in prison was "in a certain sense a prologue to the larger work [Ethics] and, in part, anticipates it." So, pace Metaxas, Ethics and the prison theology belong together.

A lot of nonsense has been written about Bonhoeffer's prison theology, but the answer to that is good interpretation, not pretending that the prison theology is a dirty little secret. Why is the Christ-centered worldly theology of the Letters so threatening to Metaxas? Because it can't be forced into a conservative evangelical mold—or a so-called liberal one either.

Metaxas writes as an omniscient narrator, a mind reader who knows Bonhoeffer's every thought and feeling. (Is this just a literary device, or does it reveal how much the author pro­jects his own views into the mind and actions of his subject?) For example, at the height of the church struggle, Bonhoeffer caused an uproar when he wrote: "Whoever knowingly separates himself from the Confessing Church separates himself from salvation." Metaxas assures us that Bonhoeffer did not think this was explosive and "never imagined that it would become a focal point of the lecture."

One curious problem parades itself in the sub-subtitle: Bonhoeffer is presented as "A Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich." With this phrase Metaxas takes sides with a group that has advocated for Bonhoeffer to be recognized as a "righteous gentile" by Jerusalem's Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem. Whatever one believes about the merits of the case, this element of the book is a piece of provocative posturing since there is no new information about the issue, or even discussion of it, in the book.

This brings us back to the bifocals and the Internet interviews. Bonhoeffer was a "theologically conservative evangelical," Metaxas told Christianity Today. Born again at Abyssinian, Bonhoeffer was called by God to be in his own time a prophet like Jeremiah, Metaxas told Christianbook.com. In an e-mail to the Catholic News Agency, Metaxas stated that Bonhoeffer has "staggering" relevance today: "Just as the Third Reich was bullying the German church, [so] the Ameri­can government is today trying to bully the church on certain issues of sexuality" and on "abortion and euthanasia and stem-cell research. . . . We would do well to take our lead from him in our own battle on that front."

Lauren Green of FoxNews.com wrote that Metaxas showed how Bonhoeffer's legacy was "the untold dangers of idolizing politicians as messianic figures . . . today as well." Reading this, a blogger wrote: "That's Obama and his followers he was warning us about." If you think that's a stretch, read Metaxas's comments last December on Fox Forum discussing White House Christmas celebrations, in which Obama is connected—in­directly, of course—to Herod.

Given all this, the most descriptive and honest title for Metaxas's book would perhaps be Bonhoeffer Co-opted. Or better: Bonhoeffer Hijacked.