ACTS BIBLE
The American Church week 8 · Ezekiel 33:1-9
The watchman who sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet. Metaxas's argument from the German church of the 1930s, and whether the parallel holds.
Three weeks in the household. Now the course turns outward, and the first thing it meets is a book on the reading list and an accusation inside it.
Eric Metaxas published Letter to the American Church in 2022. Its argument is short and it is meant to sting: the German church in the 1930s stayed quiet while evil went about its business, and the American church is doing the same thing now.1
That claim deserves better than agreement. The test starts with the sentence printed on its own cover material.
The line that travels with that book, and with a thousand sermons, is this: silence in the face of evil is itself evil. It is credited to Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
It does not appear in Bonhoeffer's collected writings. Scholars who have spent careers in those volumes have said so repeatedly, and nobody has produced the source.2
We raise it first because of what this course is. A class whose whole method is checking the other side's citations cannot put an unverified quotation on a slide. And a book arguing that the church must speak the truth is weakened, not helped, by resting on a sentence its subject never wrote.
The argument does not need it. Ezekiel does the work, and Ezekiel is harder.
God gives Ezekiel a picture. A land at war appoints a watchman. He sees the sword coming and blows the trumpet, and whoever hears and ignores it has his blood on his own head. Then the other case.
But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any one of them, that person is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at the watchman's hand (Ezekiel 33:6).3
Two features of that job, and both cut against how we usually think about speaking up.
The watchman is not judged on whether the city listened. Verse nine: if you warn the wicked to turn and he does not turn, he dies in his iniquity, and you have delivered your soul.3 The trumpet is the duty. The response is somebody else's business.
And the watchman is guilty for silence even when the warning would have been ignored. Nothing in the passage lets him calculate the likely result first. He does not get to decide the city is too far gone to bother.
That is the third time this course has landed on the same line, and by now it is the course's spine rather than a repetition. Josiah in week one, the household in week five, the watchman here. The founders in week nine will make it four. The obedience is ours. The outcome is God's.
Bonhoeffer's Germany was a state murdering Jews. The Confessing Church that signed the Barmen Declaration in 1934 was declaring against a regime that could and did imprison and execute its members.4 Bonhoeffer was hanged at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945, two weeks before the camp was liberated.4
Set that beside what an American Christian usually risks for speaking: a difficult meeting, a lost friendship, an unpleasant year on a school board, in some cases a job. Those are real costs and people in this room have paid them. They are not Flossenbürg.
An analogy that flattens the difference does two things, and both are bad. It cheapens what Bonhoeffer actually suffered, and it lets an American Christian feel heroic for an inconvenience.
It is also worth knowing that the analogy is not ours alone. Every side of every American argument reaches for 1930s Germany, which is usually a sign that a comparison is doing rhetorical work rather than analytical work. And Bonhoeffer scholars have criticized Metaxas's earlier biography for making its subject look like a modern American evangelical, which he was not.5
Strip the analogy back to what it can carry and the warning is still there, and it does not depend on Germany at all.
A church can watch something evil proceed and say nothing, for reasons that feel like prudence at the time. That happens in every century, it happened in ours, and the History course spends thirteen classes on what it costs. Ezekiel 33 says the watchman is answerable for the silence regardless of how sensible it looked, and that much stands without a single comparison to 1934.3
And then Ezekiel keeps going, and the end of the chapter may be the verse actually needed here.
Your people say to one another, come and hear what the word is that comes from the LORD. And they come to you as people come, and they sit before you as my people, and they hear what you say but they will not do it. And behold, you are to them like one who sings lustful songs with a beautiful voice and plays well on an instrument, for they hear what you say, but they will not do it (Ezekiel 33:30-32).6
Read that again with an American church in view.
The problem in those verses is not silence. The trumpet is blowing. The preaching is good enough that people recommend it to each other and show up for it. They enjoy it. And it changes nothing, because they came for the performance.
That is a harder diagnosis than the one on the cover of the book, because we have no shortage of preaching in this country. Podcasts, conferences, streams, a church on most corners. If the American church is in trouble, verses 30 to 32 describe a likelier trouble than verse 6.
Jeremiah supplies the reason. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it (Jeremiah 17:9)?7 A heart like that can sit through a true sermon, agree with all of it, be moved by it, and walk out unchanged, and never once notice that it did.
Ezekiel's watchman delivers his own soul by warning. He cannot deliver the city.
There is one who did both. He gave the warning and then took the consequence the warning was about. He lived the perfect life we could not live, went to the cross, and came out of the grave, and the debt was paid in full with nothing left for us to add. That is the difference between a watchman and a savior, and confusing the two is how Christians end up exhausted and angry.
You are asked to blow the trumpet. You were never asked to be the rescue.
God chooses, and the Father draws. Salvation is his work from start to finish; we receive it, we don't author it. And Scripture stays our final authority over this whole subject, which is why we cut a quotation we liked when we could not source it, and why we take verses 30 to 32 as seriously as verse 6 even though verse 6 is the one that flatters us.
enjoyed the sermon.
unmoved by it.
been ignored. What does that remove from our usual reasons for staying quiet?
it. What would it look like to find out whether that is us?
Next class: 1 Samuel 8, and what the founders were actually thinking about kings.