Eric Metaxas

Eric Metaxas (born 1963) is an American author, speaker, and conservative radio host. He has written three biographies, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery about William Wilberforce (2007), Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy about Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2011), Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (2017), If You Can Keep it (2017), Fish Out of Water: A Search for the Meaning of Life (2021) and Letter to the American Church (2022). He has also written humor, children's books, and scripts for VeggieTales.

Metaxas was born in the New York City neighborhood of Astoria, Queens, and grew up in Danbury, Connecticut. He graduated from Yale University (1984, B.A., English). While there, he edited the Yale Record, the nation's oldest college humor magazine. Metaxas lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter. He is Greek on his father's side and German on his mother's; he was raised in a Greek Orthodox environment.

Although he was raised in the Greek Orthodoxy and had not formally left the denomination (saying he has "great respect" for it), Metaxas has attended Calvary-St. George's Episcopal Church. He has spoken at Times Square Church. Metaxas describes himself as a "Mere Christian," in the words of C.S. Lewis. In 2007, he said his books "don't touch upon anything at all where Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians differ. They express just the basics of the faith from a basic, ecumenical Christian viewpoint. They only talk about the Christian faith that they have agreed on."

In his book Martin Luther, However, Metaxas criticized the political power structures that had emerged from the medieval Catholic Church and that it was only with Luther that the "true Gospel" was rescued "from under its crushing welter of ecclesiastical and political medieval structures." Metaxas is the author of more than thirty children’s books, including the bestsellers Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving[9] and It's Time to Sleep, My Love, illustrated by Nancy Tillman. His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

Metaxas's works If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty and Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life are both New York Times best-selling books. Metaxas's biography of Wilberforce, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, was the companion book to the 2006 film.

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy was named the 2010 Evangelical Christian Publishers Association Christian Book of the Year. Bonhoeffer is a New York Times best-seller, climbing to #1 in the e-book category. It also won the 2011 John C. Pollock Award for Christian Biography, awarded by Beeson Divinity School, and a 2011 Christopher Award. Although the book is popular in the United States among evangelical Christians, Bonhoeffer scholars have criticized Metaxas's book as unhistorical, theologically weak, and philosophically naive.

Professor of German history and Bonhoeffer scholar Richard Weikart, for example, credits his "engaging writing style," but claims Metaxas has a lack of intellectual background to interpret Bonhoeffer properly. The biography has also been criticized by Bonhoeffer scholars Victoria Barnett and Clifford Green. Despite these widespread and substantial criticisms of his work by experts on Bonhoeffer, Metaxas' book has been praised by popular magazines as a "weighty, riveting analysis of the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer" which "bring[s] Bonhoeffer and other characters to vivid life."

Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World became a New York Times best-selling book in October 2017 and claimed a New York Times Editor's Pick in December 2017. Carlos Eire gave the book a full-page review in the New York Times, stating, "Metaxas knows how to tell a story and how to develop characters, and this talent makes his narrative at once gripping and accessible." 

He also accused Metaxas of making naive Whig history, portraying Luther as "a titanic figure who single-handedly slays the dragon of the Dark Ages, rescues God from an interpretive dungeon, invents individual freedom, and ushers in modernity." Catholic church historian John Vidmar writes that Metaxas ignored more than a century of scholarship on Luther in order to write a "sweeping and largely uncritical endorsement for Martin Luther." In order to reach his conclusions, Vidmar writes, "Metaxas needs to misunderstand, denigrate, and then caricature centuries of human effort and achievement in language that is colloquial, casual, and often flippant."