Quotes from Eric Metaxas

Wilberforce could put her at ease. Some, he writes to her, "are thrown into public, some have their lot in private life…. [It] would merit no better name than desertion…if I were thus to fly from the post where Providence has placed me.

Ideas and beliefs are nothing if they did not relate to the world of reality outside one's mind.

history comprises the subjective accounts of human beings; and from these subjective accounts we arrive at an "objective" truth—which is itself still somehow and to some extent subjective.

He did not owe the Nazis the truth about the manuscript any more than the hypothetical little girl in his essay owed her class the truth about her father's vices.

the suppression of the Slave Trade and the reformation of manners.

I believe that the Bible alone is the answer to all our questions, and that we need only to ask repeatedly and a little humbly, in order to receive this answer. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Americans have an outsized tendency to romanticize the past, to see previous eras as magically halcyon and idyllic, and of no era would this be truer than the eighteenth century in Britain.

Of the many societal problems Wilberforce might have thought needed his attention, slavery would have been the least visible of all, and by a wide margin.

as I do now. . . . Since

Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God's will.

Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic. Do not defend God's word, but testify to it. Trust to the Word. It is a ship loaded to the very limits of its capacity. -Dietrich Bonhoeffer

when someone asked Bonhoeffer whether he shouldn't join the German Christians in order to work against them from within, he answered that he couldn't. 'If you board the wrong train,' he said, 'it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.

With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made "legal." Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.

He well knew his mind's natural tendency to be endlessly on a thousand subjects at once, to flit from this to that and to the next thing to no particular purpose--indeed, he called it his "butterfly mind.

It was not apathy or passiveness. For him, prayer was a display of the strongest possible activity.

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

There was only one reality, and Christ was Lord over all of it, or none.

It's so easy to become a grumbler, someone who condemns and carps at everything on principle and sees an ulterior motive behind it.

He did not hope that God heard his prayers; he knew it.

the only fight which is lost is that which we give up.

Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things, as is Christ himself.

Bonhoeffer's experiences with African American community underscored an idea that was developing in his mind: the only real piety and power that he had seen in the American church seemed to be in the churches where there were a present reality and a past history of suffering.

Future generations would be convinced that nothing good could ever have existed in a country that produced such evil. They would think only of these evils. It would be as if these unleashed dark forces had grotesquely marched like devils on dead horses, backward through the gash in the present, and had destroyed the German past too.

Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic. . . . Do not defend God's Word, but testify to it. . . . Trust to the Word. It is a ship loaded to the very limits of its capacity!