Rut Etheridge has traveled a long road from his birthplace in Massachusetts, to his teen years in Indiana, to college in Ohio, where he met his wife, Evelyn. After college, they both taught at Heritage Christian School in Indianapolis. Having grown up in a fundamentalist, independent Baptist context, the couple’s road to the Reformed faith led through the influence of Evelyn’s brother, Pastor Charles Brown of the Westminster (Prairie View, Ill.) RPC.

While teaching at Heritage Christian School, the Etheridges came in contact with Second Indianapolis, Ind., RPC, where they have been members for the past four years.

Rut has also come under care of the Great Lakes-Gulf Presbytery, and the couple is now in Pittsburgh, Pa., for Rut to finish his seminary training.

For someone who has never heard of the book Wild At Heart, could you give us a one-minute summary? What is Wild At Heart?

Wild At Heart was written by counselor and author John Eldredge. He wrote the book to help men in particular, but also women, come to a biblically based understanding of masculinity, and what it means to be a man made in the image of God. He did it in order to help people who have been emotionally, or in some cases even physically, wounded by a culture that does not appreciate masculinity in the way that the Scripture presents it. He feels that the church has become feminized in a lot of ways and men have been, for want of a better term, emasculated. He very much wants to reemphasize what he deems to be a biblical view of rigorous, image-bearing masculinity.

Did you set out to publish a critique of Wild At Heart?

No. This started with a student who came to me. I taught senior Bible at Heritage for five years, and I would try to keep up on contemporary theological movements. The senior year course was biblical worldview. We were teaching about humanism, and I used that as a dovetail to talk about open theism. As we were going through the open theology unit, my student came to me with the book Wild At Heart and wanted me to read a portion to see if I thought this was advocating open theism.

After reading it initially, my response was that it’s at least very close. That disturbed me enough to read the entire book and write a critique, not really being sure what would be done with the critique. It was my own sort of catharsis; it helped me get my own thoughts on paper. I was also hoping it would be useful for that student in particular, and others who had similar questions. It’s a nondenominational school, so this was not something that I could really talk about. It would be allowed in that particular school to talk about quite a lot in the classroom, but certainly not to push my views on anyone. It was really done almost on a one-to-one basis. If people were interested, they came to me, and I provided them with the critique. My friend, Shane Anderson, who’s a Reformed Baptist pastor in Fishers, Ind., read it, and he liked it and suggested putting it on his web site, which I was happy to do. I didn’t realize it would get much attention, but that’s what started the process.

When did you begin to realize that it was going to get much wider attention?

I started receiving email about it. I had also gone online to Amazon.com to publish a quick review of the book as many readers do. Primarily through the church’s web site, I began receiving feedback from people who had read the article. One of the people who contacted me was Doug LeBlanc from Christianity Today. He said he was going to do a feature article on John Eldredge. He was investigating tremors of discontent among Christians with the book Wild At Heart. He came across my critique through a web search and said that it was the most substantial critique he had seen in terms of the size and the interaction with the book. He wanted to know if I would be willing to be interviewed about it. I thought about it and said, “Sure.” He conducted a brief, maybe 20-minute, interview. He said he wasn’t sure if this was going to be used at all. But I was happy to do it. It ended up being a sidebar to the feature article on Wild At Heart in the August 2004 issue of Christianity Today.

Give us a summary of your critique, as it appeared in the magazine.

What appeared in the magazine was a synopsis of my article, which basically looked at the book Wild At Heart as making a poor representation of God. I thought that Eldredge was in essence projecting his own felt needs, his own personally conceived idea of masculinity, onto God and trying to find support for his views from Scripture. In order to do that he had to, I think, very much recharacterize God in some ways that were dangerous and severe beyond issues of denominational preference. The article in Christianity Today quoted the title of the critique I wrote, which was “God in Man’s Image,” and that is my basis for the critique—that Eldredge is recharacterizing God. The most telling quotation in the article in Christianity Today from my critique was when I said that the massive irony of Eldredge’s book was that he’s not willing to let God be as God claims to be in Scripture. With issues of sovereignty, Eldredge has to employ what I call the reductionist view of God in order to support his inflated views of man and of masculinity in particular.

So the way that he strengthens man actually would detract from God’s sovereignty?

Yes, and not just from His sovereignty. The gospel was affected very heavily. The issue of the way in which God communicates to man, the sufficiency of Scripture, things that are typical…among Christians, but I think the extent and severity of his recasting of God merited a critique. This wasn’t just another argument between a Presbyterian and a Charismatic about extrabiblical revelation. This went far beyond that.

Can you give me a specific example or two from the book that represents these views?

Eldredge characterizes God as an immense risk-taker, one who is vulnerable to His creation—and those are actually the words of someone who wrote to me and emailed defending Eldredge. He said that God is a risk-taker, that in essence He brings people into the situation of life, and their choices shape life profoundly, which, of course, we would agree with. But he uses the example of Gideon and the downsizing of Gideon’s army as an example of God basically throwing caution to the wind, taking a risk, and seeing what’s going to happen. The reason he casts God that way, it seems, is that he says the essence of faith is a risk. It is venturing into the unknown, and therefore in God’s character we must have this idea of God being a risk-taking God.

He does affirm, to his credit, that God knows the future; he doesn’t say that He knows the future exhaustively, but he says that God does know the future, and yet that’s where I think he falls into a lot of inconsistency and confusion with his own position.

In terms of God’s sovereignty, he refers to those who emphasize a strong sense of God’s sovereignty as “doctrinal Nazis”—those who would constantly be criticizing others for taking a lower view of God’s sovereignty. Insofar as it applies to extrabiblical revelation, he recounts a conversation that apparently he and God had where God clearly revealed to him His will for his life, which was to not take a particular job that Eldredge had been offered. The way that Eldredge relates it, the Father spoke to him and said, “John, you can take this job. It’s not a sin, but I’m heading in the other direction.” I wrote about that in the critique, that this was not just a typical example of a Christian’s struggle to find God’s will—the choice between two good options and wrestling to find out what God wants in that. This was clearly a case of God [being characterized as] saying, “Here’s what I’m doing, but you’re free to do what you want to do.” That doesn’t seem to square well with the Bible. In the critique, I say, imagine telling that story to Jonah, who was very much reprimanded for not following what he clearly knew to be God’s will in the matter.

How would you respond to this quote from Eldredge, who has said that he hasn’t read your bad press or anybody else’s? “I suppose my reaction is simply, ‘Ye shall know them by their fruits’ (Matt. 7:20). Etheridge claims I diminish God’s sovereignty and lead people to idolatry, charges not unlike those leveled against Jesus and Paul, I might note, but that’s not the actual effect that my works have had on those who read them. Far from it. Virtually every response we see is that people go on to a deeper worship of God and a deeper level of repentance. The actual fruit of my ministry—holier lives of men and women—is quite the opposite of what Etheridge describes. That’s not a bad test, as Jesus said.”

I think he hits a couple of things there. When he mentions that those kinds of criticisms were leveled at Jesus and Paul—all these kinds of criticisms have also been leveled against false teachers. I think that’s an empty argument in and of itself. Nowhere do I say that Eldredge is a false teacher or a heretic, and that’s mentioned in Christianity Today. I don’t go that far. Insofar as referring to the fruit of one’s ministries, certainly that’s a test that Jesus gives us in Matthew 7; but, as I mention in the critique, it’s not enough to have a superficial view of that fruit. I’m not accusing Eldredge of being a cult leader, but the cults can boast of happier families and social structures, cleaner “moral” lives. If we’re to use merely what Eldredge says as a means of testing those types of ministries, then every son within the Mormon church would have reason to say that God approves their ministry. When you dig deeper beneath the surface, you see problems. I think that when Jesus advocates evaluating fruit, it’s not a fruit that is divorced from doctrine. I think that true fruit in the Christian life is based upon the truth of God, and superficial fruit and superficial results can come from error. I can listen to a Mormon and then have a more polite attitude toward my wife. Yet I think when Jesus talks about good works, when the Lord talks about fruit, abiding fruit, He means implicitly that it is fruit grounded in the truth of God’s Word. I think where Wild At Heart falls drastically short is in its biblical integrity.

Will people be helped by this book? Yes, certainly some good things are said. He offers some good social comments regarding relationships, although he offers some dangerous comments as well. When it comes down to it, we have to evaluate something, evaluate fruit by its fidelity to what God has said in His Word.

Would you say that he is addressing some areas that are important, even for Reformed men to grasp?

Absolutely. He does say some very valuable things. I think that his call back to a robust and vigorous manhood is good. I think that men in our culture and in the church have, in many ways, abdicated their responsibilities as leaders of the home and as leaders within the church. He recognizes a real problem. His solution to it, I think, is the problem. Certainly Reformed men need to evaluate that: what it is to be a man of God, what defines masculinity according to Scripture, and how we are to best put to use what God has given us in terms of our gender, in terms of our position and function within the kingdom of God. We do need to evaluate those things, and I think Scripture is sufficient to address those issues. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t write books on the topic. I think Eldredge identified the problem, but his view on the topic of masculinity is more akin to a rugged, American individualism than it is any kind of true biblical conception of masculinity.

Speaking of fruit, as Eldredge points out, there’s evidence of good fruit from what he has done. There is also evidence of fruit that is dangerous for the church as a church. What have you seen in what he’s said and written about the church per se?

In the Christianity Today article he talks about a period in his life when he took a year to be away from church. He did this to, in essence, find himself, to apparently divest himself of the pollutions that the church had brought into his life. And he saw that as a very good thing—to take time away. I think that’s very dangerous. He has this mentality of doing what you need to do for yourself in order to find God, and it’s very much a retreat inward. That is opposed to the Christian view, which is a retreat to the Scriptures, to the fellowship of the believers, where Scripture very clearly tells us, “Do not forsake the assembling of yourselves together, as is the habit of some.” In his view of the church, he has a point. In many ways the church has become watered down and not bold in its witness for Christ, and yet I think he does paint with too broad a brush by saying that the church is weak and is bent on turning out Mother Teresa types instead of William Wallace types. Again the irony is that I don’t think he sees the church as strong as Scripture actually presents it. He’s talked about forming his own church, or what seems to be the beginning of his own church, and that just raises a lot of warning flags. Are all the other church groups in America so far askew from Scripture that he feels the need to start something new, which by his own admission will be something that is constantly changing? That’s certainly problematic, and indicative of his individualistic mindset in a lot of ways.

Is there any important area that you think we ought to cover that we haven’t mentioned?

The thing I’d like to mention briefly is Eldredge’s discussion of what he calls “the wound.” This is where, I think, a lot of people are going to be taken in by his writings, because he does address, again, a legitimate problem. What Eldredge means by “the wound” is that men and women—primarily men when they grow up—take these wounds, usually from their fathers. The wound as he defines it is a communication in some way to the person that they don’t have what it takes to be a real man or a real woman. In the book he recounts really heartbreaking stories of people who have been emotionally and physically abused. He has his finger on a real problem there.

But he goes to Scripture and he says, quoting Isaiah 61, that the primary mission of Jesus was to heal people and to bind up their broken hearts. He focuses so much attention on “the wound” that he equates brokenheartedness with “the wound.” There’s hardly any mention of sin, hardly any mention of eternal death and Christ’s deliverance of His people as being primarily geared toward redeeming them from their sin.

Now, I make the comment in the critique, if Eldredge was only focusing on one aspect of the gospel—in other words, the sanctification, the way in which the gospel does permeate our lives and heal our wounds that we receive from others—that would be fine. But in essence he says that Jesus’ primary mission was to come and to uncover our true selves, to heal the wound.

What it boils down to is that he says that Jesus has come to deliver us from something that wasn’t our fault. That’s drastically afoul of what Scripture communicates in terms of the issue of sin. Christ came to liberate us from that which very definitely was our fault, both in Adam and in our own individual wills and choices. That’s sin.

Does God’s Word heal us in terms of those emotional wounds that Eldredge talks about? Yes. I think that’s why his book is so dangerous, because he doesn’t point us primarily to the Word of God—at least in terms of what he covers in the book. The Word of God and our union with Christ are barely mentioned as opposed to all the other ways in which he emphasizes that. So it’s a reduction of the gospel.