Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 92 | Eric Metaxas

Episode Date: March 29, 2019

Author of "Bonhoeffer," "Martin Luther," and "Miracles" Eric Metaxas sits down with me to talk faith, liberty, and the Protestant Reformation. Copyright Blaze Media All Rights Reserved.

Eric, thank you so much for joining me. It's a sacrifice, Halley. I know that it is, but I'm glad that I got just a little bit of your time. I know that you're a busy man. I know. It's a delight to talk to you. You know that. It's fun for me, and I already, I have to start out with a stupid joke just because I like you

that much. That's my love language. I tell all people. That makes me feel really special. So you should feel special. I think a lot of you. Oh, thank you. You're like a daughter to me.

You don't realize that. Oh, are you serious? Are you serious? Or is this part of the joke? No. Well, everything I say has this kind of like joke edge. I know. You have to just kind of wonder.

But there's also truth to it also. No, I'm very fond of you and what you've been doing. It's a joy to see you doing your stuff. You are a really fun person. Like the first time I met you, I think that was what shocked me because people think of you, okay, so you wrote Bonhofer, you wrote Martin Luther. You've written a ton of other books. I think of you as an intellectual, which you are.

But you don't always think of intellectual people as fun, but you're like really fun. Well, the intellectual part is all an act. I just like study stuff and then I come out and I pretend like I've known it for years, but I'm really not that bright. Oh, gotcha. But the fun stuff, it is interesting because when I went to a very secular university, you might have heard of it, Yale University, incredibly secular, PC insane. And I kind of, you know, I grew up in a working class background.

My folks are immigrants from Europe. My dad came from Greece. My mom came from Germany. And I really discovered myself, as college kind of unfolded, I realized that I want to write humor. And so I was the editor of the humor magazine at Yale. But I was also really interested in being a writer, writer. So I've always had this weird, you know, divergent thing. And I've ultimately made peace with it.

I don't try to make sense of it anymore. I just kind of go with it. I figure, this is how the Lord made me. So I'm going to do my best to, you know, be a good steward of both weird sides of myself. I think that there's a lot of pressure, too, in this industry. And we're not in the exact same industry because you've written a lot of books, and I'm just now writing my first book. But there is a lot of pressure to find your niche and to find the one thing that you are

and to fit into a category so people can look at you and say, oh, Eric Metaxus, he's the funny guy or he's the intellectual guy. And then when you throw something else in there, like, oh, well, I'm actually funny and I write some funny stuff too. It can confuse people. It does. It does. thing. But you're right. What are you supposed to do? Just suppress one part of you. It's also part of my

calling, the calling that God has put on my life. I often say that it's my job to, I want to confuse people almost intentionally just enough so they're forced to pay attention. Yeah. In other words, people who think they can put me in a box, I would say, you know what? You can't because sometimes, I mean, on my radio show, the Eric Mattaxas show, which is now we're doing a TV thing kind of like this. But on that show, from one day to the next, one day I might be talking about, you know, Mueller and Hillary Clinton and the president. You know, like, and you'd think that it's that kind of a show. And then the next day, it's like comedy and joking, whatever. And then the next day, it's super faith-oriented.

And it's about some deep Christian thing or even the prophetic or healing or miracles or whatever. So I do think a lot of times people get confused. But, you know, this is all authentic. This is all me. Yeah. And at some point, I'm just. think what's good about it is that if people pay attention long enough, they get the person, they get me, and then they can kind of go anywhere. But it is weird. A lot of times because of the

Bonhofer book, people kind of, Greg Lorry, who's become a friend, the pastor, when he first came on my radio program, he thought of him, he was like the author of Bonhofer. He was like freaked out at me joking with him. Because you're very sarcastic and I think people might not necessarily they don't know that that's a lot, that that's scriptural. It is. It's very scriptural. Yeah. Yeah. I think that I was pleasantly surprised. though, because I love people that you can immediately feel comfortable with, and it's rare for someone that is smart. Because a lot of times when you talk to smart people, they can only talk about the things that

they are an expert in or that they know really well, and you kind of feel like, well, you're intimidated and you kind of feel like, okay, we can't even have a real conversation. But you've carved that out really well. Actually, in all seriousness, I really feel like a part of this calling on my life is to be a generalist, right? Now, it was my eclectic resume, you know, from VeggieTale. to Bonhoeff or to whatever it is, is it's God's way of calling me to the center so that I can take things that you might think of as intellectual or, you know, highly academic and translate

them for everyone because I'm not an academic or a hyper-intellectual. But I'm able to appreciate those things enough and it gives me a joy to bring it down to a level of people that they're just average folks, but they're interested in the origin of the universe or this or that. And they can't really get it maybe from the guy who wrote the book specifically on that. But I can maybe interview that guy or talk about it. So that's, I think that's actually an important role in culture to have somebody. I mean, in the past they would call them.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, the past they might call it a public intellectual. You know, I get uncomfortable with that. But I guess the idea is that it is important that everyone understand that and it's one of the reasons I love Bonhofer is that the ideas that you think are way up here are really for everyone. And so we need to be able to prove the truth of these highfalutin ideas by communicating them on a simple level. And if you can't communicate certain ideas on a simple level, you have to ask, like, is there anything to them or is it just somebody blowing smoke? Is it just pseudo-academic? There's a lot of pseudo-intellectualism.

Totally. And the way they shut you up is by saying, well, you couldn't possibly understand and whatever. And on the contrary, if you didn't understand it, you'd know it's nonsense. Right. Okay, tell me how you became a Christian. I know this story, but not everyone might, and it's very interesting. Well, the book that I'm working on right now, which I hope will be out either this fall or in the spring, is the story of my coming to faith. And it's sort of long and complicated.

The short version is that I was raised in the Greek Orthodox Church. So I was raised as a friend of God, very pro-God, but never getting any clarity. on is this really true or can we know whether it's true? There was no apologetics, it's just kind of a cultural Christian thing and you kind of go along and go along. And then I go to a very, as I said, aggressively secular PC Looney University like Yale. And suddenly all of your beliefs are challenged

and you think, did I get it wrong? I grew up in a humble background and maybe, you know, these smart people, the leaders of the world now have discovered that you can't know the answer these questions, and therefore it's not true. So how were your beliefs challenged while you were at Yale? Was it people overtly saying, wow, you're a Christian? That's really stupid.

Or was it just through the kind of pseudo-intellectualism that we were just talking about? It was everything, and that's why it's hard to explain that. But I think the bottom line is it's a cultural thing. I mean, if you go to a place like Manhattan, nobody's going to say, like, what are you a Christian? They're just going to give off the vibe that we all know that that's kind of in disproving. And that the sophisticated people, you know, don't cling to their guns and bibles and vote for, you know, cavemen like Donald Trump. Like, we all know, like, what's what.

Yeah. And then the reality is that if you don't have the confidence of your beliefs, you don't challenge that. You just kind of go, oh, yeah, okay. And you go along. And pretty soon you pick up that, well, there must be more to the story, the simple faith that I had. That can't really be it. And so what happened to me is I just drifted sideways into a kind of, you know, classic, typical tolerant, who's to say about anything or whatever.

Because I wasn't really an overt Christian. I was sort of, you know, in some ways I was, but it was a very kind of weak faith. And so as soon as it was challenged, I didn't know what to do. So I graduated really confused and convinced, as I think many smart people are, that not only don't we know the answers to these things, but even if there are answers, we can't really know them, no matter. And the smarter you are, the more you know. that you can't know because it's complicated, right?

Well, I went through a really tough time. I guess I was 24. I'd been out of college for a little bit over three years, floundering, trying to be a writer, lost. And to cut to the chase, the Lord very dramatically used this time of real trial in my life, and depression and confusion, whatever, to get to me a little bit.

And at the end of that, right around my 25th birthday, I had a dream. And in the dream, I won't tell it because it's too complicated, but in the dream, the Lord very miraculously and clearly blew my mind with his reality, his love, his prayer. It was just in a dream. So it's like I went to sleep wishing I could know that that were true, but pretty sure you can't. And I woke up like game over, done, I'm in. The Bible's true. Jesus is Lord. Where do I sign up? It was genuinely miraculous. I've written about it in my miracles book, of which I just gave you a copy. it's in that book.

And then even easier, my website is just my name, Eric Metaxus.com. There's a video where I am second video where I tell the story. But it was a truly miraculous conversion. And then I had to play intellectual. It was just like an assurance that you woke up with and you were like, no doubt this is real.

I mean, look, let's be blunt. If God speaks to you and you know God spoke to you, you can chit chat about the details for the rest of your life, but you know because the one who made every act, Adam in your body and every atom in the universe has communicated to you. So there was no doubt whether I could communicate that to people is another story. Yeah. But in my mind, it was like there is absolutely no doubt.

The details may be in doubt. I have questions and things, but of course you have questions. But so I spent the next number of years kind of reading books and sort of playing intellectual catch up to find out, you know, it's kind of like if I saw Bigfoot, right? Yeah. And I knew that I saw Bigfoot. I smelled the disgusting thing. and he's eight feet tall and then he disappears.

And now I have to, I can't run after him. So now I have to sort of say, well, I don't have any doubt what just happened. Now I've got to read books and kind of find out what can I know about what happened. But nobody's going to convince me. I didn't see it because it was right there and I smelled it. And this dream was like that. It was so real that there was zero question. I mean, this happened 30 years ago.

There's zero question of the reality of it. And once, if you watch the video at Eric McIntack, or if you read the book, you will get the details to see why it blew my mind because in the dream God spoke to me in a way that really would have made no sense to anyone else. It's like he wove a few parts of my life together in this spectacular fairy tale dream that just I knew instantly that my deepest longing is being given to me on a silver platter. It was amazing. It was amazing. So what did that intellectual journey look like? So after you see the

proverbial Bigfoot and you're studying and you're trying to figure all of this out, what did that look like? Well, it really was, first of all, there was an incredible joy to know that I could know because I was convinced you couldn't know. Even if it were true, you couldn't really know. And I think a lot of people almost fetishize the idea of doubt. Like it's cool to have doubt. And I think, you know what?

That's a lot of garbage. It's like telling your five-year-old, it's cool to not be. be sure you can swim and maybe you'll drown. Like, no, that's not cool. Like something is true and something. So it doesn't mean that you can't learn more every day. It doesn't mean that you won't have questions. But the idea that you can't know that Jesus is God and all that stuff, I say categorically, that's nonsense. You can know, just like I can know, you know, the molecular weight of beryllium or gold. I mean, these are not, like, who's to say? There's certain things that I think fair-minded people would say the evidence is pretty overwhelming. Now, most

people don't even know that, and I didn't know that. When I wrote my book on miracles, for example, I talk about the resurrection, right? I was myself astounded that this thing that I believed, okay, has so much evidence that I would call secular evidence, historical evidence, so that even if you, it doesn't make sense to you and you say, it doesn't make any sense, I don't believe that somebody could, I would say, okay, but look at the evidence and tell me, what do you think? And I think at the end of the day, a fair-minded person would look at it and go, like, you know what? It doesn't seem possible that this could have happened, but the evidence is really freaking me out. Right. Okay? I didn't know that there could be evidence, but on something

like that, it happened, you know, effectively in modern times. I mean, we have an infinity of documents and things from 2,000 years ago. It didn't happen 20,000 years ago. It didn't happen, you know, in prehistory. It happened in the middle of history. So there's all this information. So I really, when this faith thing happened like boom overnight, I guess to know that I could know was so freeing and so wonderful. It was like it was a giddy thing for me at first. And then of course, I began learning and reading and more and more. And the thing that to this day, I mean, I'm sure till I die, I'll feel this way, the fact that there is so much outrageous, wonderful evidence and so many brilliant people who believe in so many books and things that most people just don't know about.

You have conversations with people and they've never heard of, you know, whether it's C.S. Lewis or whatever. There's, that's just the tip of the iceberg. But there's this infinity of wonderful books and wonderful human beings that when you meet them, you realize not only aren't they crazy, but they're delightfully, emotionally intelligent and secure and generous and whatever. and they have this Christian faith. But the mainstream media would give you the impression that those people don't exist.

And that the evidence doesn't exist, too. And that the evidence doesn't exist. So when I discovered that it did, I've had this passion all these years and always will to get everything that I have learned out to a more general public. It's why I write the books that I write, just because I think that if most people knew this, it would change their lives. And I'm convinced they're not going to see it on the networks. They probably won't even see it on Fox.

they're probably, it's just people don't have time, you know, they want to cover the news, they want to cover politics, they want to be, and all this other stuff. Yeah. Is fundamentally more important to help you understand the newsy stuff. Right. If there was one book that you would tell people to go to of yours, or not of yours, someone who's maybe starting the journey that you were on when you were about 25, trying to figure it out and trying to understand, okay, is there really evidence?

Is there reason behind all of this stuff? what would you direct people to? Well, that's always impossible to answer. I wrote three books with the title, Everything You Always Want to Know About God, but We're Afraid to Ask. The first one is called Everything I Always Wanted to Know About God, We're Afraid to Ask. The second one is called Everything Else You Always Want to Know About God We're Afraid to Ask, which is just a continuation.

And it's fun Q&A of this kind of stuff, right? And then the third one is Everything You Always Want to Know About God, but We're Afraid to Ask. The Jesus Edition, which talks about, you know, the resurrection and all that stuff. So those are real primers on the basics, kind of a fun Q&A. A. For somebody who's just like, I don't know. The Miracles book is also a very good one for that because I get into the scientific evidence for how do we know whether everything just came into being randomly or that there was an intelligence behind it. The evidence is freaky. It is so freaky. And what amazes me is that most intelligent Christians don't, haven't been exposed to it.

Yeah. And I think, you know, a lot of people say, well, I'm going, I'm going through like a really great Bible study on Ephesians right now. And I go, that's great. But if you're in the workplace and somebody challenges you, that science kind of disproves faith or there's so many planets in the universe, the idea that we're the only ones here and that some God created it, that's just nonsense. And you think, most people don't know how to respond to that. I have been, as I say, nothing less than astounded at what good materials there are available. And again, part of what I do is I'm a popularizer. So like I read books by somebody like John Lennox or by Stephen Meyer or by Hugh Ross.

I've had them all on my radio program. By having them on my radio program is one way to get their, you know, information out there. But in my book, Miracles and other books I've written, I kind of give you the bite-sized version of it. Yeah. And in the Miracles book, I talk about the origin and the universe and all this stuff in a way that, you know, as I say, your average reader is going to be able to understand it. but it is so astounding that I wish I could, I mean, frankly, they should be teaching this stuff in every school in America, not just in Christian schools, because the evidence is overwhelming. And so that's my passion.

It's like, look, it's true. If you can rebut it, good luck. But they act as though, oh, it's already been rebutted. We don't even need to talk about it. It's like, oh, really? I think you're afraid to look into it because it's going to scare you to death. In fact, Christopher Hitchens, obviously before he died, said, somebody asked him, what is the greatest argument on the other side for God. And he rather honestly said, oh, there's no question about it.

It's the fine-tuned universe, blah, blah, blah. And he said that that's the one that gives all of us on our side pause that we don't really have an answer for it. But they rarely communicate that pause or even the possibility that it could be out there. Not only that. Not only that. But when I wrote my Miracles book, I wrote an op-ed on what we're talking about. They titled it, science increasingly makes the case for God. And it went into the Wall Street Journal. It went insanely viral like nothing that I ever dreamt, like 650,000 Facebook shares, like the kind of thing that is just nuts, right? Why am I saying this? I'm saying this because the amount of people who wrote, the number of people who wrote against what I wrote, and in their first couple of sentences

were like, all this stuff has been disproved years ago. And it's like, we've already answered this. And I thought, wait a second, Christopher Hitchens just said, no, you didn't. Christopher Hitchens said, this is the one that gives you pause. So if you want to make some kind of argument of sophistry and twist it around whatever, have at it. But if you're honest, you can't dismiss this. This is the one thing that to most scientific materialists is horrifying because they don't have an answer. So you know what they come up with? The big one is they come up with the multiverse theory.

They say like, oh, we have no evidence for it, but we're pretty sure there's an infinity of universes. And this is just the one where everything kind of worked out perfectly. Oh, and by the way, we happen to be in that one. That requires infinitely more faith than the wildest Christian claim you've ever heard. But who has the guts to face that in the academic environment and so on and so forth? So it's important we push because the evidence is there. My question is, how does someone say someone, read your article and said, okay, I believe that

there is a directed force behind this fine-tune universe because it's too hard for me to believe, like you said, that this all is just kind of random. It just doesn't make that much sense because I was actually just listening to a podcast that made this argument. How do you get from there to the God of the Bible? Why isn't it some just random creator we don't know? I think, to be fair, you don't have to. Now, there's some people, they'll stop there.

But like anything else, if you want to know what this intelligent force might be, and if you're open-minded, and it takes courage to be open-minded. But if you want to know, there is ample evidence that would, again, logically suggest. You know what people say, like, faith is a leap in the dark? That is totally wrong. Not true, yeah. I mean, if anything, faith is a leap in the light. You're not meant to believe things where you say, well, I don't know if it's true, but I believe it.

Do you think God would ask us to believe something? He only tells us to believe what is true, okay? And so there are all kinds of evidences for these things. But it depends on each person's journey. My journey was kind of weird. Like I already knew that Jesus is Lord and the Bible is true and all that stuff before I had the intellectual evidence for it. But that's not to say I didn't have any. intellectual evidence. It's just that the kind of intellectual evidence that I had is harder to

articulate. But anytime you believe something, it's disingenuous to make it sound like, well, I don't have any reason. I just believe what I believe. Then you shouldn't believe it. Like you have to know. It's kind of like, again, if somebody said to me, like, you know, you know your father, like you've met your father and stuff. I go like, yeah, like I had breakfast with him. I just talked on the phone. They go, well, how do you know you know? And it gets into a kind of absurd conversation. When I get in my car and turn on the thing, like I know it's going to go forward, people say, how do you know you know? That becomes sophistry and silly. You know, if people don't want to know, they kind of hide in that kind of stuff.

But there's so much evidence for the Bible. I mean, you could get into the archaeology. You could get into the manuscript evidence. The evidence for the, you know, what's called the historicity of the Bible or the veracity. It's huge. And the funny thing is, there's way more today than there was 40 years ago, 50 years ago. Like, the evidence, one of the ways you know something is true is that the evidence for it increases rather than decreases. Kind of like talking about Darwin, right? Darwin said 150 years ago, you know, I think the fossil record as time goes by, we're going to uncover more and more of these linking forms between, you know, we found this and we found this and over years.

We'll find this stuff. Not only hasn't it happened, precisely the opposite has happened. We found more of this stuff and more this stuff and nothing here. And so after 150 years, you have to start saying, okay, the evidence actually seems to be pointing in the opposite direction, that if there was this thing called evolution, that it was directed by intelligent force, it couldn't have happened by random mutations the way, you know. And so it's really, it takes courage to be honest, because some people are scared by the implications. And it's almost, I mean, it is like a religion without a name.

I was just watching the Flat Earth documentary on Netflix. I'm not sure if you've seen that. There's a whole Flat Earth community on YouTube. They're convinced. And they show them doing these experiments to prove that the Earth is flat. In the experiments, they realize, oh, dang, the Earth is actually rotating. This ruins everything. But that reminds me of what you were just saying.

All this evidence comes out. But they've already got their conclusion. And they're not going to let go of it because just like flat earth is this religion, this community, this cult. And it's who they are now. It's the same thing with Darwinism or the neo-athias, whatever they're called now. Yes. It's who they are. It's their identity.

It's their worth and it's their church. You have said it. And that's why I think we have to push people and say, why do you cling to this faith when the evidence points against it? You would do me the honor of telling me that my faith is nonsense. if the evidence points against it. Like, let's have a fair conversation. But we have to be honest that most people are afraid to face those kinds of facts

because they do have a predetermined worldview that they're clinging to. And that's normal too. In other words, just because a few facts come and doesn't mean you throw away your paradigm. But at some point, the welter of evidence says maybe you should begin looking more open, be more open to the situation.

So, again, but that takes courage. Yeah. I think the cop out typically is at least at first is, well, I'm not going to believe anything that is not materially proven. Everything that I need to know about the universe and what I feel can be seen in the material world. But we know that's true. If you look at things like beauty, meaning, morality, purpose, love, all of these things that aren't just chemicals in our brain or neurons in our brain firing off because there's really no Darwinian explanation for why these things would exist. If natural selection is really all there is.

Once you get someone to admit that, okay, not everything that you know to be true, you know beauty to be true, you know love to be true, you know them to be actually real in your mind. They're not just chemical reactions. Once you get them to admit that, then it opens the possibility that, okay, maybe not everything can be explained by what I see physically. Well, even the concept, even this idea that science can explain everything is, are you ready for this, utterly unscientific. science is just science. Science cannot tell you why the earth exists. They can tell you that it exists. It can describe it and describe it and describe it. But I think what horrifies scientists is that even science can point you beyond science. In other words, if science, like science can't tell me what happened before the Big Bang, but it can point me to the mystery of this moment when the universe comes into creation, and it can lead fair-minded people to say, wow, that suggests a number of things.

Now, you can't go back there with a test tube and calipers and figure out what happened before. So you've bumped up against the limit of science. But science nonetheless can point beyond the limit and suggest that there are things beyond the physical universe, even though they can't prove it. So it's really a bizarre conundrum because you have a lot of scientists. who are themselves reaching way past science. And then when you say something that they think unscientific, they kind of say, well, that's unscientific.

And you want to say, well, excuse me, you're being unscientific. And somehow through the tools of science, suggesting that science is all there is and the physical universe is all there is, you can't even know that. So if you want to be honest, you have to at least say, we can't know. But rather than be scientific and honest about it and say, we can't know, they overreach and say, we know. And if you disagree, you're stupid.

you're unscientific. It's like a really weird place. And I'm sure that there are a lot of scientists who kind of get this, but they're maybe afraid to speak out or something because the scientific community, you know, kind of like the political climate, people are so aggressive and nasty that if they don't have an argument,

they just try to shut you up. Yeah. If someone were to ask you, okay, fine. But why Christianity? Why is Christianity different than any other religion? There are many reasons. I guess the first one I would say is Christianity straight up says in history, this thing happened where a human being comes into the world and they say was sent by God, in fact, was God in the human

flesh, that he died on the cross, that this was part of God's mysterious, strange plan, and then he rose from the dead, not from the sick, not from the coma, from the dead that God raised a human being to life as a way of showing all kinds of things, his power over death, that he is life, and also as a way of showing the power of love over hate, the power of good, over evil. There's an infinity of things that we say happened in history. And, you know, all serious Christians have always said, as Paul said, if that didn't happen, the whole thing might as well be thrown in the garbage. So anytime anybody says, well, Christianity teaches the same stuff as this or this is,

I would say, no, no, no, no, no. Christians have had the guts to say this stuff does not matter if that didn't happen. If that didn't happen, then we're just, we're talking about nothing. So Islam, Judaism, any other kind of religion says that didn't happen. And so I think we have to be real clear that that is the one clear difference. It's not really an ideological difference per se, but it becomes ideological. But I guess that we can't pretend like, well, it's all about some kind of teaching. And no, truth is truth.

And good teaching and wisdom or wisdom. But you can have that without Jesus and without, you know, you can talk about those things. But the Christianity and the Christian religion. religion have always said that at the heart of all of that is a person, that God is a person that he came into the world, into history, as a person. And therefore, that is different than talking about a God presence, a divinity, a Godhead, a Christ consciousness, whatever. All that stuff is very different than what the Bible teaches. But I would also say that the Bible and the Christian faith makes more sense than a lot of the other religions in terms of the idea of forgiveness.

Yeah. How do you deal with evil in the world? Yeah. You know, all that stuff. And then the most fundamental thing, I would say, Christianity is the only religion that is an anti-religion, religion. What I mean by that is that every religion, since the dawn of time, since people were like, you know, killing chickens and covering themselves with chicken blood and whatever, every human being has had a sense since the fall that there's a problem. that we are somehow separated from whatever it is up there, that we have this kind of guilt that we can't bridge the gap between us and the gods or godhead or divinity.

Every human society has acknowledged that and then tried to deal with it in different ways by doing X and Y and Z and then do X and Y Z again and there's this kind of pecking order. How do I work my way up to bridge the gap? Maybe only the shaman can do it and whatever. So everybody is trying to bridge the gap. And even Judaism is effectively trying to deal with that. And there are these religious rituals and so and so forth. And then Jesus comes into the world and says, okay, now do you realize you can't do it?

Now do you realize that no human being through human effort can bridge the infinite gap, which you know is there. Therefore, God has come into the world to bridge the gap for you. And if you accept Jesus by faith, then you are by faith. in him enabled in yourself to bridge the gap with him and to be at peace with the God from whom you have been distant and with whom you've had this broken relationship. All of that can be healed, but God has to initiate it. So in a way, in a way, Jesus ends all religion. And so even the Christian religion can become a kind of a counterfeit of itself where

it becomes like yet another religion. And of course, that's what Jesus came to abolish. So you have all these kinds of heresies within Christianity, which are tending toward these other religions where they say, well, here's the pecking order. Here's what you do. You do this and this and this and this and this. So it's on you again, right? And Martin Luther, of course, kind of rediscovers this 15 centuries after, you know, Jesus and says, hey, we have slid the Christian faith and the church has slid into doing the very thing that we ought to know. Jesus came to abolish.

And we need to get back to that and understand it's only by faith in him and it's only he who can bridge the gap. And so that, you know, you talk about fundamental difference between the Christian faith and every other religion. It's like pretty big. Okay. So you mentioned Martin Luther and him saying, okay, we've gotten into this legalistic thing where we're saying you got to do these things in order to get closer to God or to be holy,

whatever. And he said that's not the gospel. Tell me what he did for those who don't know. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I wrote the Bonhoeffer biography and the Wilberforce biography, and I was sure that I would never write another biography. And I had two friends, Greg Thornberry and my friend Marcus Speaker, who said, no, no, no, Eric, you have to write.

The 500th anniversary is coming up. You have to write the biography of Luther. And they went on and on and on. And the way they convinced me was by helping me to see what I had not seen before. I'm always happy to confess my ignorance. people think that I've known this stuff forever. No. They convinced me of the influence of Luther,

that what he did absolutely change the world and created the modern universe in which we live, right? For good and for ill. I never really saw that. And so it intrigued me. And then the second thing is like he's such a funny maniac that I knew writing about him would be fun. Yeah.

And I always joke around that he's such a maniac. He makes Trump look like Mike Pence. Yeah. He is incredible. So if Martin Luther had a Twitter, it might be bad. Well, he did have a Twitter. It was his pamphlets. No, I mean, there are weird parallels.

But before we get into that, or we don't have to, but it would be fun to. But that's what convinced me to write about him is that I thought, oh, my goodness, I've missed the import. And you cannot underscore it. I say, without doubt, he's the most influential person in 2,000 years apart from Jesus. There's no doubt about it. He did not set out to be, in fact. influential, but he ends up being influential. Why? Because just what you were saying, he basically frees the gospel to do its thing in history. You have, you know, you kind of wonder, why does God

do things the way he does? Why would he allow us to fall and then to have these, you know, centuries, millennia of whatever it is before the Messiah comes into the world? And then you think, well, okay, and why does the Messiah have come into the world at this point in history? And then why is in it all over then? Why do we have to have 15 centuries of whatever before Luther comes in and says, oh, by the way, we've been getting all this wrong? And effectively, he frees the gospel. Now, the gospel is freedom. So it's like he frees freedom to fly out into history and to touch everything it had not yet touched. And the number one thing is this idea that if I'm to have a personal relationship with God. I have a personal responsibility. I can't point to the priest or the governor

or the prince or the king or anything. God says, no, no, no, that's over. Now you have a direct relationship with me and you talk to me. It doesn't mean you don't look to other people for wisdom and that you don't know everything, but fundamentally there's this relationship. Now, that ought to have existed from the beginning, but somehow it got obscured in 15 centuries of history. And as we know, because human beings are sinners, and we drifted so far away that we created what God had come to abolish, which is this kind of system of how you get to God. A hierarchy. That wasn't even very different from, you know, the Jewish system. It's just this, the same kind of thing, except now with this patina of Christianity over it. And so Luther, in a sense, sees this

And not intentionally sparks a revolution that we call a Reformation. I mean, it's almost like you pull a thread. Nobody else was willing to pull the thread. He says, well, I think I have to. And let's see what happens. And I'm going to trust God. And he pulls the thread. And the whole sweater unravels.

And, you know, you have a naked guy without a sweater. And you got a lot of trouble. And the whole world turns upside down. And basically, has Reformation ever been described as a naked guy without a sweater? Probably not your... I'll have to look. I'll have to look. But it is kind of funny because he didn't intend to do that, but he was willing to do what

he thought God called him to do. And so what Luther did at the heart of it is said, I'm going to trust God rather than man. And I'm going to trust that God, being a God of love and mercy, that even if I screwed this up, he wants me in my heart to trust him first and not to be afraid of what man can do to me, burned me at the stake, but to be too afraid of what he will do to me if I completely blow him off and worry about what these men can do to me. I'm going to worry about what God is going to do, and even if it's not a fear thing of hell, but it's the idea that I have this joy of serving God, and 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, I know why I'm doing what I'm doing. And by the way, he had studied scripture so much that he didn't think like, hey, who's to say. It was pretty clear to him that they had missed this. But so there's a number of things that happen. One of them is that for the first time he sees daylight between truth and power. Now, imagine this, right? The church, the Western Church, the Western Church had over the centuries amassed complete power so that if you wanted to know what is true, you had to go to them. So Luther, by reading the Bible, and by the way, nobody was really reading the Bible,

except Luther for reasons I go into in the book, he discovers that, okay, I see some daylight. I see a crack. I see light coming through this crack. We need to address that. We need to patch up the crack or figure this out. As in this is what the Catholic Church is teaching. Here's what I'm reading in the Bible. There's a gap between the two.

And it wasn't even necessarily what they were teaching. They might be teaching the right thing, but the practice of it was harmful. You know, it's not like, I mean, of course, some of what they were teaching was wrong, but it's almost like it wasn't like official doctrine. It was sort of like side doctrine or how they interpreted the doctrine. He says, listen. Like is indulgences an example of that? Yes.

Indulgences is an example of that where you could argue that there's nothing so wrong with the concept of indulgences in its pure form. But very quickly it becomes a source of income. It's just like the federal government. When you have a tax, okay, he said, we're going to have a temporary tax to do this or to do that, to raise money for this or for that project or something like that. Great. But we know what happens. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupt.

absolutely when there's money involved, suddenly that tax becomes permanent. And suddenly they say, you know what, if we could raise this much money with that tax, why wouldn't we double that tax? And why wouldn't we make everybody pay that tax? Not just these people, but it becomes a revenue stream. Human sin nature takes over. So this thing called indulgences, which you could argue is a very simple way of saying to somebody, look, okay, you've sinned. I mean, we could use more of this in the evangelical church, right? Instead of saying, hey, hey, there's grace, man. there's not grace. There's Jesus dying on the cross, which is a painful, costly grace. So when you sin, you should take it seriously and want to make reparations, for example, right? I mean, if I murder somebody,

you don't say, hey, there's grace, man. It's cool. It might be cool in terms of your salvation, but in terms of your life and the life of people around you, you'd say, I know I can never make that right, but I want to do everything I can to show my, my, repentance. I want to write a book about it and have the funds go to the people who've been affected by this. He says, I'm going to pay the poor. Yes, I'm going to pay back the people. So that's a biblical principle. And so the Catholic Church in part would say like, okay, you sin. So you pray this prayer. And I can imagine a very loving, fatherly priest who cares for the soul of somebody. And it says, okay, you've done this sin. Pray these prayers. And, uh,

Why don't you pay something to the church, you know, to show that you're serious and it'll go to God's work. It can all be on the up and up for that person's soul. But pretty quickly it became corrupt. And so suddenly it was like, hey, that money you're going to pay to the church, let's triple it. And let's start preaching indulgent sermons to get money to pay for St. Peter's in Rome. And by the way, St. Peter's in Rome is a great thing. So it's all good, right? Yeah.

Well, it became really bad and really wicked. And Luther saw a number of these things. it ironically didn't really start with indulgences. I mean, the whole thing was kicked off with indulgences, but he saw a number of little issues. And he said, let's do the right thing and try to fix it. Yeah. And what happened when he went to fix it, when he sees this daylight between what is true and what the power says is true, and he says, we want to fix this, their response was shut up. Yeah. And if you don't shut up, we're going to kill you. How's that, Luther? Shut up. And he said, whoa, if you're telling me to shut up, I'm starting to now wonder, do you care about truth or do you just care about power?

And that's when he got more and more radicalized, so to speak. He kept thinking, who am I dealing with? I love the church, but these forces in the church seem to be forces of Antichrist. So I've got to speak louder and be less conciliatory. I've got to wake people up. So it becomes a kind of a war. But at the heart of it is this idea, which we now take for granted, the difference between truth and power. We now know that one person could have the truth and that power could try to crush it.

We know there's this thing as illegitimate power. If I'm in North Korea and I say, hey, this is true. And they say, no, no, no, you don't get to say what's true. Only we get to say what's true. Well, in the West and in the Christian world, that was not rectified until the Reformation. The Reformation said even a common man might see the truth of God and the powers that be in the church might get it wrong. So they didn't wipe away hierarchy, but they said, we've got to rethink this here because truth is not malleable. Human beings can get it wrong.

The church at the time was trying to say Luther, no, the Pope can never get it wrong. And the church can never get it wrong. Now, to some extent, that might be true. And it was today the Catholic Church would say that if the Pope, is speaking ex-cathedra, which he almost never, ever, ever does, that that it's the Holy Spirit, kind of like a church council where we say that what happened in Nicaea or whatever, that that was the Holy Spirit. It wasn't just a bunch of people voting. But Luther was seeing that they're starting to blur the lines. They're getting confused. Truth cannot change. And the word of God

is the one way we know like what is true. And so this tiny little thing sparked the reformation and really gave birth to the West. Because once you allow the, you allow the the possibility that the church is wrong and that we have to start a church that gets this right. By allowing for the possibility of a second church, you've just opened the door to 10,000 churches. You've just changed everything. And so now it becomes a personal thing. What church do I go to and how do I know who's teaching the truth?

That's called freedom. And it's a terrifying thing, but it's at the very heart of the gospel of Jesus. And so Luther brings that into the world. And the ramifications in history go way beyond what I've just said, which you know, because you read the book and you know about this. It goes everywhere, including to the issue of self-government and American-style liberty. We could not have American-style self-government and liberty. The United States could not exist if Luther had not pulled the thread.

Yes. I tweeted something along those lines the other day. And my Catholic friends who I respect, some of whom you know. And I'm a very pro-Catholic, non-Cathic. I say that clearly, because it's true. I am a very pro-Catholic, non-Catholic. But there's some people get very hidebound on these issues and they, you know. Yes.

Yes. And the pushback typically is with the Protestant Reformation from the Catholic side, again, Catholics that I love and respect and know are very smart. And I've studied this stuff is that, okay, one, no, the Protestant Reformation did not help build the West. It was actually the Catholic Church that did it solely. And all the Protestant Reformation did was, divide. And now look, you have all of these different denominations, they say, and how can you say that's a good thing? My response would be kind of what you said. That's always the risk that you have in freedom. And by the way, we're not saying it's a good thing. We're simply saying that

it is what it is. In other words, what people who were the enemies of Luther predicted would happen did happen. And so it is this calculation. You say, okay, we're going to give the possibility for people to believe whatever they want. And some of them will believe that. the wrong thing, well, it's really just what you said. It's called freedom. So then the question becomes, as William F. Buckley used to say, the question becomes how we draw the line, because at some point we know that it is impossible to coerce someone toward the truth, that somehow we have to choose truth and God freely. So as a parent, you'll be a parent very soon. Actually, you already are. When you're a parent, you have to think, what can I force my, in my case, my daughter to believe or do?

And what am I going to have to trust God with? That is the challenge. Because if you could force your child to believe everything that's true and to be perfect, on some level you would. But then you realize I can't. I only have a certain freedom. And you could say the same thing about the church and about governments. They can only do so much. And the genius of the founders of the United States of America was that they understood this. They said that in order for freedom to flourish, in order for faith to flourish and virtue to flourish, we have to make it absolutely free and uncoerced. if we establish a religion and we tell everyone they have to go to this church or that church or not to go to church or to go to a mosque or whatever it is, if we do that and we use our power

to force people to do that, to the extent that we use our power to do that, we really squelch the authenticity of those expressions of faith. It has to be free. And we know that when we don't coerce it, some people will blow it off altogether. But that's freedom. And that's something that we have to trust. It's almost like trusting the free market. The free market doesn't guarantee us that everything is going to get better and better,

but it says that this is our only shot at that. And so if you have a virtuous population, a virtuous market, virtuous citizenry that we want good things, the market will give us good things. If you have a perverse population, they will want better and better pornography and drugs and whatever, and the market will deliver that. At the heart of everything we're talking about is this idea that we have to have virtue for democracy to work, for freedom and self-government to work. We have to have virtue for the market, the free market to work. All these things cannot be coerced. And this is to me the ineffable

genius of what we call liberty. And it comes right out of the gospel that God says, there are no guarantees. You are free to walk away from me. You're free to walk toward me. but no one can coerce you in toward walking toward me. We all know stories of people who were raised in a very strict, let's say, fundamentalist kind of Christian environment who rebelled against it. There is a real line. And I think in history, the founders, they tried to get this right. They tried to say, we can encourage faith, we can encourage virtue.

But at the end of the day, it's a cultural thing. It is not a government thing. It's not a state thing that we can force. The Reformation enabled us to see that. And it came with a lot of downside, and I'd be the first to say that my Catholic friends are right about a lot of that. But I think that it nonetheless happened, and in part happened precisely because of the Catholic churches in that period getting this wrong. And they were kind of like the coercive parent who is so overbearing that it forces the kids to rebel. And there's a scripture, right, that parents don't exasperate your children.

Yeah. That's a biblical principle that if you are so threatening and heavy-handed at some point that kid's going to run away from home. And that's part of the story of the Reformation. Yeah. I think a great way for people to start getting educated is reading some of your books. So can you tell everyone where to find you? What?

Yeah. That's my favorite interview question. It's like, and how can we get this lovely product? Actually, no, in all seriousness, I'm passionate about my books and I wish I could give them to everyone free. I really can't. I do that when I can. But my website is ericmataxis.com. Obviously, you can get them all over. Barnes & Noble.com, Amazon.com, whatever. But I think that my if you can keep it book, as I say, it's the sort of thing that I so wish I could give to every American because in writing it, I understood that this is absolutely crucial. We need to know this stuff. And we need to teach this stuff. We need to get excited about it. You can get that anywhere. But I mean, I feel similarly about most of my book. honestly, because I feel an urgency about these things. The time is short and we need to, well,

let's put it this way. We should be happy that there are these wonderful answers. We don't have to say, what's happening? What's going on? I really believe God is always on the throne. Even if things go to hell, God is still on the throne and he still commands me to rejoice in him, to be anxious for nothing, whatever. Like, we need to know that, first of all. And then, you know, speaking as a Christian, I say that if we don't fight for what we know is just and true and beautiful, there are people whose lives are depending on it. There are poor people right now who are going to grow up in the culture that we allow to exist. And I think if you care about them, you have to take this stuff seriously. And that if the church can't be the church and get excited and involved in this

stuff, it really is on us. So keeping the republic is on us. And it will not be kept. unless we keep it. And so I just want to say to everybody, that's my life. That's what I care about. And so I just hope that I can inspire people along those lines. Yeah. Gosh, there's so much more I want to talk about. I think it's especially important for Christians

because unfortunately we see a large section of even previously conservative evangelicalism moving towards the left. And we could spend a whole episode on that. So maybe we'll do that next time. You know what? I would really love to do that. It's so much fun to talk to you.

And these are so important things. But I would love to do that if we can do that, Allie. That would be fun. It's important. Yes. Well, thank you so much, Eric. And everyone, go check out Ericmottaxis.com. And they can follow you on Twitter if they want to.

I'm on Twitter. I'm on Facebook. I'm on Instagram. And most importantly, I have a daily radio show where I have on the most amazing guests ever. If you sign up from my weekly email at Ericmuttaxas.com, we'll weekly send you like details of every episode. So you can just click and listen to it. it. And a lot of it's on video right now. I have interviewed amazing people from way on the left to way on the right. I just did a huge thing with Milo Unopoulos. I know. I don't like that.

Crazy. No, I know. But I'm saying like I am, I run the gamut. I interview people with whom I disagree. Yeah. And well, you'll see. You'll see. It's. Yes. I mean, you're never going to be bored watching or listening to your show. That's for sure. And I think that's good, especially for us millennials. Well, thank you so much for listening. And we will see you here on Monday. Thank you.