Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul Book

Average Rating:

Some wrongly criticize WILD AT HEART, believing Eldredge is offering up macho, dim-witted masculine bravado, or they believe that this work will be a free pass for men to leave marriages in the dust on a search for lost dreams. Eldredge will have none of that, and says himself in the book that such men are "deceived about what it is they really want, what they are made for." Don't be fooled by the various criticisms that ignore Eldredge's real meaning. A real man's desires are shaped by the Lord.

Instead, WILD AT HEART is about restoring a Godly dream in the soul of a man. A desire to truly be a man, rather than a softened-neutered-nice-but-restrained-guy that the world has somehow dictated that Christian males should be. Nice men may be socially acceptable but in creating them we have snuffed out the very fire that God would have us fan in our pursuit of Him.

This is an attempt to re-kindle that flame. To restore the three longings that are at the core of each man: a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue. Eldredge's arguments are firmly planted in Biblical principles, as well as his past personal experience. His writing style is very easy going, and he uses a lot of illustrations from popular culture, which makes the reading fun. I believe this book is an awesome wake up call to the church. For too long men have weakened themselves by ignoring our God-created passions. WILD AT HEART shows us how to restore them, and challenges us to take the right risks and live the adventure. It may be a bit scary (after all, did God give Abraham a risk-free offer on his call to leave Ur?), but there's no other way to reach the real fulfillment that God would have us find. I'm not a big fan of "men's books," but this is one that I am so glad that I did not miss. You shouldn't either. FIVE STARS.

Some wrongly criticize WILD AT HEART, believing Eldredge is offering up macho, dim-witted masculine bravado, or they believe that this work will be a free pass for men to leave marriages in the dust on a search for lost dreams. Eldredge will have none of that, and says himself in the book that such men are "deceived about what it is they really want, what they are made for." Don't be fooled by the various criticisms that ignore Eldredge's real meaning. A real man's desires are shaped by the Lord.

Instead, WILD AT HEART is about restoring a Godly dream in the soul of a man. A desire to truly be a man, rather than a softened-neutered-nice-but-restrained-guy that the world has somehow dictated that Christian males should be. Nice men may be socially acceptable but in creating them we have snuffed out the very fire that God would have us fan in our pursuit of Him.

This is an attempt to re-kindle that flame. To restore the three longings that are at the core of each man: a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue. Eldredge's arguments are firmly planted in Biblical principles, as well as his past personal experience. His writing style is very easy going, and he uses a lot of illustrations from popular culture, which makes the reading fun. I believe this book is an awesome wake up call to the church. For too long men have weakened themselves by ignoring our God-created passions. WILD AT HEART shows us how to restore them, and challenges us to take the right risks and live the adventure. It may be a bit scary (after all, did God give Abraham a risk-free offer on his call to leave Ur?), but there's no other way to reach the real fulfillment that God would have us find. I'm not a big fan of "men's books," but this is one that I am so glad that I did not miss. You shouldn't either. FIVE STARS.

This is a sad book - sad in proving how far the Church has fallen from its roots. Francis Schaeffer has said that what you find in the world you will now find in the Church seven years later, and almost to the day, the Christian men's movement hit its stride about seven years after Bly's "Iron John". But even as the world has moved beyond Bly, we Christian men are still lugging his (now "sanctified") baggage around. "Wild at Heart" simply adds to the burden.

By now, we are all familiar with the laments: feminism stole our destiny, our fathers are the cause of our problems, a real man is only truly fulfilled by lugging around a broadsword, and lastly, that we all think with our genitalia. Mix in an appropriate amount of psychobabble, some sprigs of Hemingway and Spillane, and a sprinkling of random Bible verses, and you have the perfect recipe for disaster.

Christian men of a hundred years ago would in no ways recognize this book as being Christian, so egregious are the errors and doctrinal deficiencies. A couple cases in point:

1) The amount of eisogesis that occurs in this book is staggering. Eldredge reads the Bible through the eyes of William Wallace (of "Braveheart" fame) rather than through God's eyes. For example, Eldredge heartily advises his son to return pain for pain when the son is confronted by a bully, arguing that despite Jesus' admonitions to turn the other cheek, Jesus was a man's man, a carpenter who hung out with fishermen, therefore it is okay to return like for like. He quotes Jesus' driving the moneychangers out of the temple as a proof text. However, Eldredge totally forgets the entire Passion story, wherein Jesus would NOT defend himself physically against his attackers, and went so far as to not even defend himself verbally. The focus of Jesus' anger as in the temple story is not on his own person, but the person of the Father. The Father was wronged, therefore the anger and actions are justified. We are not to seek justice for ourselves, but for those outside of us. Remember Romans 8:36 - "As it is written: 'For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.'" Read the life (and death) story of any martyr and you will see the wrongheadedness of Eldredge's beliefs.

2) The worship of self, especially as embodied by the unholy alliance of psychology and Christianity, is paramount in this book. It is all about what can be done for me, how I can find fulfillment, find my life. This mentality runs exactly counter to Matthew 10:39 -"Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." Eldredge makes much of a "false life", but in the end the life he claims is true destroys his own arguments in a fit of circular logic. The very men he claims as heroes mostly lived in a time before pop psychology and "finding oneself" came to the fore. We can admire men like Lincoln, Wallace, and Washington for their strength, but do you think that Lincoln sat around moping about the fact that his dad treated him badly? Did he abandon his country because of personal tragedies, like the death of his children, so he could instead blabber to his shrink about his personal needs going unmet? Despite the fact that Eldredge dismisses "sucking it up", the truth is that real Christian men do suck it up. They know that life is greater than their own needs and wants, therefore they crucify the self in order to pursue the greater need. Eldredge laments that Christian men are bored. I contend that if those same men every truly tasted the fulness of God by dying to self, then the staggering nature of the greater need outside their own search for fulfillment would be made apparent to them and they would never know boredom again.

Is Eldredge right in that men are hurting? Yes, he is. And to his credit (and good enough to rescue him from the dreaded "one star" rating), he nails most of the problems. His deficiency is in his answers to those problems. Unfortunately, he sees the world through a syncretistic lens that distorts his views. Because of this, "Wild at Heart" makes a caricature of everything it discusses. It poses a form of maleness and male Christianity that looks good on the surface, but is empty underneath. Read this book in the light of books like Edwards' "Religious Affections", Bonhoeffer's "The Cost of Discipleship", and Schaeffer's "The Great Evangelical Disaster" to see it for what it is truly worth.