(Adapted from my review posted last year and available here.)
It was in 2006 that I had managed to catch up to yet another Christianity-acclaimed author: John Eldredge, writer of the 2001 Wild at Heart book and its successful spinoffs.
It’s written for men, and yet although Eldredge is clearly an avid outdoorsman and guy who likes to leap off cliffs and things, his style is often very dramatic, almost feminine. His style contrasts with that of some other Christian men’s books, whose shorter, journalistic sentences cut the poetry and flowery adjectives and get right to the roots.
Worse than the style is this: in terms of defining a man’s role Biblically and how truly redeemed men of God should operate in a rebellious world, Eldredge falters — repeatedly.
In his haste to rebut — and rightfully so — secular and Christian notions of sensitive, caring Nice Guys in touch with their feminine sides, Eldredge unfortunately goes too far, and “wildly” outside of Scripture and common sense.
Walk on the wild side
Despite his own few disclaimers, Eldredge more than indirectly describes his own favorite hobbies — biking, hiking, running from an angry bull moose, etc. — as typical as those of the Wild Man, who has truly become free.
Eldredge naïvely applies this one-size-fits-all approach, based on whatever outdoorsey things worked for him, as if they will work the same for every crisis-afflicted man every time. Meanwhile, guys who enjoy painting, writing, or perhaps that corporate work Eldredge often dismisses as stunting to “wildness,” would fall far outside the stereotype. Instead, it seems the inevitable result of the Man Who Is Truly Set Free will be a sudden craving to rappel off a high sharp place.
That could be dismissed as merely the author’s narrow-mindedness, and rather juvenile self-focus. By far the worse problem is where Eldredge thinks far too broadly: proof-texting multiple Scripture passages and distorting God’s nature to fit his own “wild” worldview.
‘Wounded’ by un-Biblical ideas
Wild at Heart usually acts as a sequel to something. Eldredge’s often-meandering style leaves one not wanting more in the manner a great book brings, but in the way rendered by a book whose author hasn’t exactly finished every thought. One can easily read and keep thinking, This is a supplemental. It’s as if Eldredge is writing for people already exposed to something.
One could assume that prerequisite book is the Bible. But Eldredge never directly recommends reading the Scriptures or repenting to follow Christ before considering Wild. Instead, to make the “wild” ideas take hold, Eldredge merely assembles a montage of Scripture passages and other quotes, old and new, from psychologists, religious writers, recording artists and very often the Mel Gibson movie Braveheart. The character William Wallace of that film is frequently upheld as a Wild Man whose example we should emulate. (This book was written, of course, before Mel Gibson made his famous film about the truly best Man — and God — Who ever lived.)
Eldredge does devote considerable time to God Himself. Yet at times his portrayal of the Almighty is downright human — as another reviewer wrote, this is “God in Man’s Image.”
God is the ultimate Wild Man, Eldredge maintains. He enjoys taking risks. And His creation ultimately reflects that wildness, Eldredge writes, by way of thunderstorms, pods of killer whales, great white sharks, rattlesnakes and angry, charging bull moose.
“After God made all this, he pronounced it good, for heaven’s sake,” Eldredge explains.
Hold up. Read over that Wild list for a moment and consider: thunderstorms, sharks, rattlesnakes and bellowing moose can kill people. And if God makes all this because He’s wild and likes challenge and adventure, therefore — part of God’s “adventure” is killing people?
But Eldredge is nowhere near wanting to make God the infamous “author of sin.” In fact, he reveals his views as drastically opposite. “In an attempt to secure the sovereignty of God, theologians have overstated their case,” which results in a chess-player God Who directly causes sin, Eldredge says. “Clearly, this is not so. God is a person who takes immense risks.”
Of course, Eldredge assures readers he’s not advocating Open Theism. For those unfamiliar with the term, the word “heresy” will do instead, for it describes an unbiblical God Whom you can surprise. Yes, some may indeed “overstate” God’s sovereignty and decide He plays both sides of the chessboard; but Eldredge goes to the opposite extreme. Both hyper-Calvinists’ and Eldredge’s Open Theist versions of God have Him directly causing sin and death — the latter view begging that conclusion because God is a risk-taking, “wild” Deity.
Informed Christians understand the original creation was “very good” (Genesis 1:31). And it was “wild” and adventurous enough without moose chasing people all over the place. Eldredge goes outside of Scripture in merely that explanation. It is enough to undermine his whole foundation. But his errors hurtle even closer to the cliff’s edge from there.
Later, Eldredge re-describes the Rebellion in Genesis, running the narrative like everything else through his own standard gender-roles filter. Evidently the reason for Adam’s sin was not rebellion against God’s law, or wanting to be like God. Instead, the first created man “gave in to paralysis,” Eldredge writes. “He denied his very nature and went passive.”
Indeed, a case can be made that this is a secondary aspect of the Rebellion or a consequence of sin — that men forsake their roles as leaders and give way to passivity. But it’s not the cause of the first sin! God in Genesis and everywhere else in Scripture made it clear that idolatry ruined everything first and everything else is just secondary. Still, this is the “wild, wild” world of Eldredge, where apparently only denying gender roles ruined everything.
Just understand not only God’s wild nature, but how Adam denied his own wild nature in God’s image, and all men’s other problems are made clear, Eldredge contends. That includes the “wound” that every man supposedly inherits, likely passed down by his own father. Here Eldredge abandons Scripture even more and instead goes all secular-psychologist on readers.
The wounded before the spiritually dead?
Again Eldredge’s myopia is clear: A man’s denial of his Wildness or a Wild God is indirectly tied to the Wound he must have received as a growing boy. Here multiple male anecdotes come into play, chimed in by song lyrics: many men, Eldredge among them, give their accounts of mistreatment from their fathers, who may have told their sons they were worthless, would amount to nothing, and other condemnations.
Once more, a one-size-fits-all approach. If you’ve formed a False Self, or if you’re hurting, it’s your father’s fault.
To be sure, no thinking person would deny that is true for countless people, in a world of rebellion that often has rejected God’s designated roles for men and women and the sexes’ very real differences. But to portray all men as suffering the same affliction without regard for diverse circumstances, other problems and altogether common sense — it’s a cause/effect procedure, a diagram from a book — is rather a “wild” concept indeed. Yet it’s been common to some psychiatrists and approaches to therapy — un-Biblical ones — for years.
Comedy columnist Dave Barry spoofed this approach in a mid-1980s column, reprinted in Dave Barry’s Bad Habits:
PSYCHIATRIST: And what seems to be the trouble?
PATIENT: I’ve been having these horrible, splitting headaches.
PSYCHIATRIST: And when did these headaches begin? Around the time you realized your father was a horrible man?
PATIENT: No, my father was a wonderful man. My headaches began last week, when I was working under a car and the jack broke and the car fell on my head. I’ve also been bleeding from my ears.
PSYCHIATRIST: I see. And was your father’s name Jack?
Eldredge goes far outside the Scripture again when he contends that men must come clean about their “wound.” It sounds almost like an altar call to salvation, except for one crucial element. Eldredge, in effect, maintains that wounded men must admit and repent — repent the fact that It Wasn’t My Fault.
A quoted scene from the movie Good Will Hunting plays this out. A psychiatrist must get his patient to “repent” by admitting several times that It Wasn’t His Fault. “It’s not your fault,” the psych tells “Good Will” over and over. “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.” Until finally Will breaks down and is forced to admit the fact that — well, he’s guilty of nothing.
Eldredge skips over the fact that Biblically every man is guilty of a heinous crime: insidious rebellion against a holy God! Of course, many men’s fears and the factors that have led to their problems are often unavoidable, but that’s the result of another man’s rebellion against God that has led to the man’s maltreatment of others.
Rebellion against God is the true Wound, but it’s much worse than just an injury: the Bible is clear that humans are dead in their sins (Ephesians 2:1-9, Colossians 2:13). And the Biblical God, because of His sovereign, holy nature, is repulsed. Therefore Christ, because of His mercy, will resurrect His people from that death as He resurrected Himself. Only then can He begin work on the numerous scars and wounds committed on the person after he was killed.
Eldredge doesn’t just write about working a surface treatment for a living person’s wounds. Instead, he presents a Savior Who will stitch wounds (real or merely perceived) without first resurrecting the individual from his or her spiritual death.
Such a view is understandable, at least from a human point of view. If a doctor stands before a battlefield filled with the wounded and dying, and those already dead, he should tend to the wounded first. But the Almighty God, as is typical for Him by human standards, does take a “wild” approach: He raises the dead first! He can do that!
Dismissing ‘doctrinal Nazis’?
That is Wild at Heart’s mortal wound: Eldredge skips over the rebels-and-resurrections doctrines. He seems to assume you’ve already read the Bible, or may somehow get into those other peripheral things such as sin and Grace after you’ve dealt with your father’s nasty treatment or your own vital desperation to prove yourself a man.
But any criticisms of his worldview, based on the felt-needs framework and “gender recovery” mind trips, won’t be well-received. Early on, Eldredge dismisses those concerned with sound teaching as “self-appointed doctrine police” who practice “doctrinal Nazism.”
Like most, he’s likely referring to those who swerve too far into Pharisaical legalism, which stifles true growth in the Person of Christ. But such an approach miscasts the Pharisees and gets the problem completely backwards: the Pharisees’ flaw wasn’t forcing everyone to accept their correct and proper Biblical doctrines. It was making up new rules, with if/then, cause/effect approaches to every problem, and saying they were equivalent to what was actually in Scripture.
That is exactly what Eldredge has himself done. The “wild” focus has led him in the book to proof-text Scripture to support his redefinitions of God, human rebellion and the seriousness of humankind’s “wound.” And he naïvely applies these concepts to all unspiritual or “problem” men, rather than sourcing his views in the actual Bible.
Perhaps sticking with the Scripture is all the more becoming the truly “wild” concept in the Church, while too many of its members increasingly seek after psychology and worldly traditions rather than the Person of Christ Himself. His Word should never be replaced by the worldly wisdom of men — either “wild” men or otherwise.
