Let's go to tape.

Bonhoeffer's voice, Metaxas explained, was prophetic:

    "I see him as someone who like Isaiah, or Jeremiah, was saying things to call the people of God to be the people of God... In his day, clearly his voice was not heeded. His voice, if it's prophetic, is not Bonhoeffer's voice--it is really the voice of God."

"This HHS mandate" situation he said "is so oddly similar to where Bonhoeffer found himself" early in the Nazi era. "If we don't fight now," Metaxas warned,

    "if we don't really use all our bullets now, we will have no fight five years from now. It'll be over. This it. We've got to die on this hill. Most people say, oh no, this isn't serious enough. Its just this little issue. But it's the millimeter... its that line that we cross. I'm sorry to say that I see these parallels. I really wish I didn't."

But there is a part of his quote that I did not use.

"We are getting a second chance...so we don't make the same mistakes and go down the same road."

So let's review.

Metaxas, a biographer of the famous anti-Nazi German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, tells us that Bonhoeffer and his generation of Christians failed to halt an epochal horror, and that Metaxas sees our current situation as similar to the one in which Bonhoeffer found himself. But "we" are somehow getting a "second chance." As if we are somehow an extension of the age and contemporaries of Bonhoeffer.  If so, and "we" are therefore in an era analogous to the early Nazi era, how then shall "we" live?  What would Bonhoeffer do?  Alas, Metaxas leaves us with more questions than answers -- except for his violent metaphors.

For example, what would the "second chance" for Metaxas's notion of Bonhoeffer Christians be?  Greg says he is troubled by Metaxas' "lack of clarity." But that is the thing about metaphors, isn't it?  Metaxas asked us to consider "if we don't really use all our bullets now, we will have no fight five years from now... We've got to die on this hill."   I think Metaxas was being as clear as he dared about a matter he claims to see as seriously as, well, totalitarianism and genocide.  Remember, it was Metaxas who made the Nazi analogy, and invited us to interpret his violent metaphor, not me.

But let's consider the possibility that Metaxas was not offering us a considered metaphor in light of his Nazi analogy.  In that case, was he being so reckless in his use of language in discussing a man he considers to have sometimes been the voice of God -- that someone might come away thinking that Metaxas had just called for insurrection against the government of the United States?      

Certainly violent metaphors are not uncommon in political discourse and are usually benign, even if they sometimes go too far.  But we also know that violent metaphors are not limited to politics and are sometimes actually about violence.  I think the available evidence and the context of their use in this instance, points clearly to the latter.