Captivating - a book review of sorts

I know this book has been around for a while, but given that it seems to be continuing to make such an impression on so many women, I thought I should read it and see what all the fuss was about.

There have been some good reviews on this book already - in particular I recommend that you read this review by Donna Thoennes. But since I am partly writing this blog to organise my own thoughts and I want to be prepared to answer the next person who asks me what I think about it, I thought I'd (briefly) share some of my own thoughts as well.

First, the positives. At the most basic level, one thing I appreciated about the book was that there was an acknowledgement that there is a difference between men and women, and encouragement for us as women to be glad and thankful that God has made us women and to enjoy the ways we are different from men. This goes against the idea that much of our society holds that there are no inherent differences between the sexes. I also thought it was good that the authors tried to show that God is a God of beauty, and is a God who loves us and wants us to be in a relationship with him.

That being said, I still had some huge reservations abut the book, which I have tried to sum up under two headings - (i) problems with their method of approaching the topic; and (ii) a whole series of resultant problems with the substance of what they write about God, about women, and about what God has done for us in Jesus.

Method
As a general rule, bad methods tend to produce bad results. And the method that John and Stasi Eldredge have followed seems to me to have been almost guaranteed to produce a distorted picture of what it is to be a woman in relationship with God .

From the start of the book to the finish, the argument is carried along by a tidal wave of pop culture references (particularly movies - there are 38 mentioned in the book - Tim Challies counted them, not me!), generalisations about the desires and emotions that we grow up with as girls and women, and stories about 'words from God' that the writers claim to have received. There are references to the Bible as well, but it tends to be used selectively and decoratively. Rarely if at all do the authors allow the difficult, confronting, challenging words of Scripture to test the 'words from God' that they claim to have heard, or to critique the perspectives of popular culture and the desires of the fallen human heart. How do you hear God speak? According to the Eldredges (p.126) you go to a quiet place, put on some headphones and listen to a song from Phantom of the Opera, then 'write down what you hear God say in the depths of your heart'. You take your Bible with you too, presumably so you can flip through it to look for a verse that resonates with the thoughts of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The outcome of a method like this is (inevitably!) a God whose voice is little more than a soothing echo of the voices of our culture. So, for example, in relation to the book's central theme of beauty and the desire to be seen by others as beautiful, the word of God endorses the concept of beauty as a good gift of God built into the creation, but sharply criticises the vanity, superficiality and idolatry with which we poison that good gift in our fallen minds and culture. Throughout the book there was an almost total absence of words like this and this that the bible has to say about beauty. 1 Peter 3 rates an occasional mention, but the passage gets transformed from a challenging, difficult call to submit to our husbands and to cultivate the gentleness of Spirit that God sees as beautiful, into a narcissistic reassurance that God thinks we're beautiful people, inside as well as outside.

Another classic example is their treatment of Proverbs 31, in which they dismiss the Prov 31 woman as a guilty, uptight woman with no time for sex:

We're all living in the shadow of that infamous icon, "The Proverbs 31 Woman", whose life is so busy that I wonder, when does she have time for friendships, for taking walks, or reading good books? Her light never goes at night? When does she have sex? Somehow she has sanctified the shame most women live under, biblical proof that yet again we don't measure up. Is that supposed to be godly-- that sense that you are a failure as a woman? (p 6)

Substance

Not surprisingly, the picture of God, us, and what God has done for us in Christ that emerges from this method falls seriously short of the Bible's picture.

(i) Who God is
The overwhelming impression that emerges from Captivating is that the love of God is the love of a needy romancer. The Biblical imagery of God as the husband of Israel and of the church (eg. in Hosea, Ephesians and Revelation, together with the age-old allegorical interpretation of the Song of Solomon) is transformed into an image of a God who is my own personal lover in the sky, whispering to my heart via the lyrics of Emmylou Harris songs (p.120), or (because he has been "captivated by my beauty") stretching out his hand to me and asking "may I have this dance?" (p.228)

Think of one of the most romantic scenes you can remember, scenes that made you sigh. Jack with Rose on the bow of the Titanic, his arms around her waist, their first kiss. Wallace speaking in French to Murron, then in Italian: "Not as beautiful as you." Aragorn, standing with Arwen in the moonlight on the bridge in Rivendell, declaring his love for her. Edward returning for Elinor in Sense and Sensibility, and professor Behr returning for Jo at the end of Little Women. Now, put yourself in the scene as the Beauty, and Jesus as the Lover (page 114)

What is seriously under-emphasised, if it survives at all, is the Bible's stress on the immense, transcendent, holy, awe-inspiring glory of God. If the authors had been a little less dismissive of "that infamous icon, the 'Proverbs 31 woman'," they might have learned that (whilst "charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting") it is "the woman who fears the LORD" who is to be praised.

(ii) Who we are as women and what God has done for us in Christ

The Eldredges' method also leads to a different theology of who we are as women. Their starting point is that all little girls long to be thought lovely:

Remember twirling skirts? Most little girls go through a season when they will not wear anything if it does not twirl (and if it sparkles, so much the better)...Their young hearts intuitively want to know they are lovely. (p 13)

There is very little serious attention paid to the problem of our deep-seated, ingrained, sinfulness - the fact that our hearts, according to Jeremiah, are "desperately deceitful" and, according to Jesus, are the source of "evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly". Instead, it is "the world" that is "broken and ugly" and our hearts that are intrinsically beautiful:

Beauty is core to a woman -- who she is and what she longs to be--and one of the most glorious ways we bear the image of God in a broken and often ugly world... So the choice a woman makes is not to conjure beauty, but to let her defenses down. To choose to set aside her normal means of survival and just let her heart show up. Beauty comes with it. (p 132-3)

So what do we need God to do for us? To see our inner beauty, fall in love with us, ride up like a knight in shining armour and carry us away with him to be romanced.

Within that framework, Jesus' death in our place on the cross seems almost redundant. It gets a mention from time to time, but it's not the heart of the book in the same way that it's at the heart of the Biblical gospel.

In the end, I came away from the book with the sad feeling that I was reading what amounted to another gospel and a different Jesus, shaped to fit with the imaginings of our hearts.

This is not a book that I would recommend!

Have you read it? What did you think?