Go to the Source.

My husband is a very patient man.  Having just endured a thirty minute sermon-lecture with the text, "My people perish for lack of knowledge," I think he deserves a quite comfortable mansion in the heavenly kingdom.  If salvation were by works, of course.  

In all seriousness, having checked in with the goings on in the world of history, I came across the following statement in today's article which I had been waiting for, about Eric Metaxas's biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and which confirmed some suspicions I had had about his "biography": "his biography, which is free of German sources."  I had to re-read that a few times.  Did I understand that correctly?

Source: http://cloclo1114.deviantart.com/art/Huh-61267719

"Free 
               of
                         German 
                                            sources." 

See, this is what I suspected but did not have confirmed, until I read the article today and subsequently preached a lecture to my husband about anti-intellectual Americanity.  Or just Americanism, if you please.  It did not seem to me, knowing the bare bones of what I know from studying German culture and politics, that Bonhoeffer would approve at all of the Christian support of the rise of Donald Trump.  Just knowing the culture and a basic understanding of the state of the German church during that period suggests that much.  Come to find out, Metaxas might not have really cared about the culture and person he was describing, as much as the points he wanted to make about the man's life. 

Further, skimming some of Bonhoeffer's own works in the original German (via Google) I have discovered a man who was the antithesis of the kind of bold and brash Christianity many American evangelicals, including Metaxas, are apparently promoting today.  German Bonhoeffer comes across humble and studious, a deep thinker, and definitely not a soundbite for Republican politics.  In my view, it takes time to grasp the soul of a man, and to write a biography without referencing at least a little of the original language and culture of the person being described, seems to me to be a form of eisegesis, as opposed to exegesis.  

Also having personally done the hard (and lifelong) work to learn the German language, and knowing how important our native language is to our cultural understanding of issues, I would suggest that without referencing at least some writings in the subject's language, any biographer would be in danger of remaking the subject into their own lingistic-cultural image.  This is what I suspect, based on the commentary I'm seeing, is what may have happened with Metaxas' Bonhoeffer.

That anyone would try to write a biography without referencing some study of the nuances in the language and culture of their subject, seems to me to be shoddy workmanship.  What makes me froth at the mouth (figuratively, thank the Lord) is that American evangelicals lap this kind of stuff up from some self-professed authority conveying reality to them, and don't think too deeply about their source of information.  Nor do many Americans do the hard work of their own research, and evangelicals in America increasingly seem to despise critical thinking (apparently preferring "teachable-ness"), which is arguably a cultural factor in how German Christians were duped by the Nazi regime.

I mean, when you have Donald Trump joking about whether we should keep the non evangelicals , but you are "not allowed" to comment from history on what Adolf Hitler said in a speech in Passau in 1927, in seriousness, about the Christian faith as he saw it: ,,"In unseren Reihen dulden wir keinen, der die Gedanken des Christentums verletzt ... Diese unsere Bewegung ist tatsächlich christlich '' - "We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity... in fact our movement is Christian"), we have not only a problem of willful blindness, but of willfully anti-intellectual ignorance that prefers partisan illusions to a fair discussion of objective facts.

To bring this back to my "sermon" text, which I have taken out of context myself for this post, so do due diligence in checking up on the context, "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge, " I can only say what I am so horrified at in American culture, and what is so deeply troubling in the American evangelical church, is this collective willingness to be led rather than to seek the truth for oneself.  

In context, the lack of knowledge described in this verse was not intellectual reasoning skills or capacity, nor was it linguistics, understanding of history, or humility regarding culture, but the knowledge of a holy God.  I would suggest that a willful lack of devotion to following God rather than earthly leaders, even if it means our death, is at the heart of the American evangelical betrayal of Christian values this election year.  This is about the hearts of many evangelicals, gurus and lay-folk, and how they are willing to compromise and twist truth to gain or maintain power.  Which again, has parallels with the state of the Christian church in Nazi Germany.

But don't take my word for it.  Do your research, and please, don't just depend on Metaxas, or Ramsey, or Dobson, or The Gospel Coalition, or Alex Jones, or the Huffington Post, or whoever or whatever else you like listening to for your understanding of the world and our place in it.  Check your sources, and go to primary sources, even if those who set themselves up as thought leaders are too lazy to do so.

Think for yourself.

It is my hope, that this election year will raise awareness to the American evangelical crowd, with their overemphasis on "community" of the importance of personal devotion to Christ and freedom in Christ, even when that means we find ourselves following Him alone as individuals for a time, scorned for our convictions by those who are considered by themselves and many others as leaders.