As an official card-carrying member of the John Eldredge book club, I have read all of his books except for his latest, Walking with God, which is next on my list of reads.
In an interview with Beliefnet.com, the bestselling author urges men to overcome the stereotype of Jesus as a “bearded Mr. Rogers”, and reclaim passion and adventure as part of their faith.
Eldredge has written that Christianity, as we know it today, has done some “terrible things” to men.
“Christianity has basically communicated to men that the reason God put you on this earth is to be a good boy. Mind your manners, be a nice guy. That’s soul killing! It’s not true, and for a man to hear the message that the greatest achievement of his life is simply not rocking the boat, not offending anyone, not taking any risks but just being a genuinely swell guy–that kills him,” he says.
Eldredge believes the soul of a man is made for something much more dramatic.
“Look at the films men love, whether it’s Chariots of Fire, Schindler’s List, The Shawshank Redemption, the Die Hard films, Indiana Jones, or James Bond. They all involve a challenge, a great battle, something to be won, some deep hardship to be faced and overcome. That’s the soul of a man. To tell him that you’re really not made for that, that what God really wants is for you to be an altar boy, kills a man. It takes all the passion out of life,” he says.
Eldredge notes that every man carries a wound in his soul and that the deepest wound is the “father wound.”
“Little boys or little girls learn gender identity from our fathers. The little boy wants to learn from his father, ‘Do I have what it takes?’ The little girl wants to know from her father, ‘Am I lovely?’ If you ask women, they’ll say that their deepest wound is from their father and centers around that question,” says Eldredge. “For many of us, our fathers are gone–or if we went back to them, they’d wound us again. They’re not good men. I think that’s why, among other reasons, God is portrayed in the scriptures as a loving father. We take our need from our earthly father and bring it to our spiritual father, our real creator and the one who truly knows us, knows us more deeply than we know ourselves. Only through God can the wounds ultimately heal.”
With Father’s Day right around the corner, it’s important for us men to explore what a biblical father, a loving husband, and a tenacious warrior for Christ should look like in the times we are living in. I have to agree that modern Christianity hasn’t nailed it on the head when it comes to exemplifying godly men. Not that we need some kind of hyped up “We’re Men!!!” (pounding the chest) pep rally, but we do need a more accurate biblical portrait of a man: the warrior, the adventurer, and the lover.
As William Wallace so vividly stated in Braveheart, “Every man dies, not every man really lives.”
Too many men have been emotionally emasculated by their earthly fathers. Others have been spiritually emasculated by the church. As a result we have twenty, thirty, forty, and fifty-year old boys failing to become the men God designed them to be. As husbands and fathers, we must get back to modeling authentic Christ-like manhood in our homes. As Christ followers, we must return to biblical manhood in the church and in our communities.
Manhood and fatherhood may not have been rightly modeled for us in the past, but we don’t have to add to the tragedy of men living like weenies. We can do better for the Kingdom of God – we can become men who are ‘fully alive’.