John Eldridge and Staci Eldridge

John Eldridge is a phenomenon.

I had a friend who raved about The Sacred Romance, and I gave it a shot. Verdict: the best parts were ripped off C.S. Lewis; nothing else seemed that great.

Then, a few years later, every Christian evangelical man I met seemed to have had his life recently changed by Wild at Heart.

With great reluctance, I read it, and it hit me, too. I’d never found another author who so well described the frustrations evangelicalism imposed on masculinity. (I didn’t notice at the time, but they’re basically the same frustrations you’ll find described by Tolstoy, Falludi, and Wolfe; the problem isn’t evangelicalism vs. men, it’s just men.)

It hit me hard, and led to a lot of great talks.

A month or so later, though, when I tried to encourage myself by reconstructing his arguments, the satisfaction lessened. There were some deep problems in his theology that I’d missed because his examples were so relevant, as though a physician had a gift for diagnosis, but no ability in epidemiology or treatment.

The problem came to the forefront in Waking the Dead: at a fundamental level, Eldridge seems to believe that God is the best of gods, but not necessarily God. He makes a big deal of “sovereign” really meaning “Lord of the Angel Armies!”, as though a it would be better to be a commando than to have your finger the nuclear hot button. It’s as if he doesn’t realize that a qualitative difference appears, one that requires the abandonment of “romance”, when you switch the argument from whether Batman could beat Superman to whether Superman could beat God.

I decided Walking the Dead would be the end of my reading of Eldridge.

But then we were at an isolation camping for debriefing and recovery, and they had Captivating sitting there, and I gave it another chance.

Staci Eldridge helped out on this re-imagining of Wild at Heart from a female point of view. If you’ve read Wild at Heart, imagine the same outline, run through a Search/Replace program that switched “wild” for “beautiful” and Braveheart for Steele Magnolias, and you’ll have the basic idea. My wife said it was a stretch.

It would be easy to focus on the weaknesses of his work and trash him, but he really was onto something with Wild at Heart. If only he’d turn that passion toward building up God instead of building up some glorified dirt and ribs.