Christ gave his Church a rule for quarrels between brothers. Go to him alone. Then take witnesses. Then tell the church. Eric Metaxas made his charge on a public feed. Father Calvin Robinson says he took the steps first.
On Wednesday morning, Metaxas, the author and radio host, posted the speaker lineup for a Christian conference and called the men on it "a gang of demon-possessed Jew-hating weasels." They were, he wrote, "pretending to believe in Jesus." The NXR Studios conference, "Christ Is King: America After Trump," opens Thursday in Dallas.
Eleven men appear on its poster, which Metaxas shared from a post by Joel Webbon, NXR Studios' chief executive, billing the event as "Explicitly Christian: no Judaism, no Hindus, no atheists, no gays" and "America First: no Israel, no Zionism, no more foreign wars."
One of the 11 is Fr. Robinson, a Command Media broadcaster and a priest with Old Catholic orders who serves an Anglo-Catholic parish.
On Wednesday, Fr. Robinson called on Metaxas to repent of "calumny and bearing false witness." He wrote that he had first gone to Metaxas privately and that fellow Christians had tried to act as witnesses. Robinson wrote that Metaxas recognizes no authority but himself and rejects "all Christian reconciliation," so he would treat him "as an outsider," call him to repentance and evangelize him.
That is the order Christ gave: "If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone." If he will not listen, "take one or two others along with you." If he will not hear the church, "let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector" (Matt 18:15-17). Robinson ended with a call to conversion: "I pray you repent and come to the Christian faith."
The Catechism names the sin Robinson charged. A man commits calumny when, "by remarks contrary to the truth," he harms another's reputation. He commits rash judgment when he assumes a neighbor's moral fault "without sufficient foundation." Detraction and calumny, it teaches, "offend against the virtues of justice and charity."
St. Thomas Aquinas called reviling the act of one who "publishes something against another's honor." Done to dishonor, he wrote, it is "a mortal sin no less than theft or robbery." A good name, he taught, is the most precious of temporal goods, and the man who takes it "is bound to restore" it.
A Christian who brands a slate of fellow Christians demon-possessed on a public feed has done exactly that. He owes them a public retraction. Metaxas should give one.
Robinson says he has done what Christ asks: he went to Metaxas privately, then with witnesses. Now he has named the sin in public and left the door open. Metaxas can still walk through it.
