john eldredge wild at heart core values of a woman

Finding little to relate to in this vision of woman as passive princess, I sought solace in egalitarianism-a form of Christian feminism preoccupied with establishing a biblical basis for the fluidity of gender roles and the spiritual authority of women. This perspective was an emblem of gender complementarity in the Evangelical understanding.

A man’s heart is “wild and strong and valiant” hankering for exploration and conquest, while a woman simply longs to be pursued and rescued: “the world kills a woman’s heart when it tells her to be tough, efficient, and independent.”

Eldredge presents men and women as two partial reflections of God: “There is a masculine heart, and a feminine heart, which in their own ways reflect or portray to the world God’s heart.” These two “hearts” are not so much complements or analogues, but polarized opposites.

And a woman’s telos, conversely, is to be that Beauty who is rescued and swept up in the man’s heroic adventure. The basic premise of Eldredge’s book is that God creates men to be chivalrous Beasts with a hunger for adventure, a need to fight battles and rescue a Beauty. This bestseller, ubiquitous in evangelical circles, provided a dizzying mash-up of fairy tale tropes, pop culture references, and bible verses, in order to unlock the hidden mysteries of the masculine heart. In those days-the early 2000’s-the pop-Christian livre de jour was a book called Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul by Jon Eldredge. When I was an undergraduate at an Evangelical university and beginning to think more deeply about gender, there were two basic paradigms on offer: egalitarianism and so-called complementarity.

John eldredge wild at heart core values of a woman