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In my e-mail correspondence with Eric Metaxas, for a profile I wrote of the evangelical author and public figure, Metaxas dismissed criticism of his 2010 book about Dietrich Bonhoeffer by, among others, University of Virginia professor Charles Marsh. Marsh, who directs the Project on Lived Theology at UVA, and who wrote a 2014 biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, responded to Metaxas’ comments in an e-mail. His response is below:
A brief response to Eric Metaxas and his quest for the manly evangelical
Charles Marsh
In his 5500-word email response to Jon Ward’s queries, Eric Metaxas addressed the question of how he might respond to the criticisms in my article, “Eric Metaxas’s Bonhoeffer Delusions”, which appeared in the fall of 2016 in Religion and Politics. Metaxas said he was unaware of the piece, but that my biography, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Knopf, 2014), he considered “lamentable”, “intellectually hideous”, ‘shockingly — and unintentionally hilarious”.
Metaxas is aghast that I broached the subject of Bonhoeffer’s sexual orientation, but Bonhoeffer’s sexuality has long been discussed by scholars and translators, students and former associates. Metaxas would know this if he had even once attended a meeting of the International Bonhoeffer Society or joined any of the numerous symposia and seminars convened each year.
Three decades after Bonhoeffer’s death, the question of his sexual orientation was posed to Bethge at an…
